Entropy
by kiwipixel77
Summary: "Entropy is the natural state of the universe, Captain. All systems inevitably dissolve. And when that day comes to Halcyon, we will be ready." In which Ellie hates everyone and everything, then learns to maybe not hate everyone and everything so much. Male Captain/Ellie
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Hello my lovelies! I have returned from the dead, not with Elder Scrolls or Fallout, but this time The Outer Worlds.**

**I love this game. I love my Captain. I love Ellie. And there is not enough Ellie fics on here, let alone Ellie romance fics.**

**So here. Happy birthday.**

**Also: WHY ARE THERE NO OUTER WORLDS FICS ON THIS SITE?**

**This fic will probably be another chapter long, I think. We'll see.**

**A/N**

_"Alex Hawthorne,"_ she says, swirling the name around her mouth like bad alcohol. She sucks back another long drag of her Stogie Slim, ignoring the way Dr. Mfuru glares at her. "Yeah, I've heard the name before. Smuggler, aren't you? Your ship's the _Unreliable?"_

"The one and only."

"So it's true, then, that you smuggled all the Lemon Slapps out of Cascadia before the town went to shit?"

"Yeah. You're welcome, by the way."

"And that you boarded a freighter and nicked their shield servo without them noticing?"

"Sure, why not."

"I also heard on the Aetherwaves that you blew an entire marauder crew out the airlock _of their own ship."_

"Well, if it's on the Aetherwaves, it _must_ be true."

Ellie smirks and works her jaw, eyeing this captain from head to foot, and the man smiles back.

She's been around enough liners and hotdogger mercenaries to know half the shit they prattle about isn't true, but nevertheless, she appreciates the attempt. Style does count for something, she figures.

But she likes him. He looks capable enough, well-armoured and well-equipped, so she lets him talk to Mfuru, lets him square her debt with Jessie. Which means she's in _his _debt now.

Great.

"Look, Hawthorne," she says later, watching Jessie disappear into the crowded street outside the med bay. "I don't know why you helped me out back there, but you did, and I owe you one. Hm. Tell you what – I'm a little short on bits at the moment, but I'm a decent scrapper and better-than average sawbones. If you're looking for a medic, I can work my debt off."

The Captain crosses his arms and smirks. He's good-looking enough, for a drifter, his jaw strong and his eyes sharp and his brown hair unruly, like it can't be truly tamed. "Hm," he says. "You _really_ don't like owing people, do you?"

"No, I don't."

"Well, I didn't do it so you'd owe me. How about you give me your pack of Stogies and we call it even?"

"What,_ these_ Stogies? Sorry, can't. These cancer sticks are like gold 'round here. Worth sixty bits a pop."

"Well then, welcome aboard..."

"Ellie."

"Right. Ellie," he says, shaking her hand. "Welcome aboard."

He never does tell her why he did it.

But she follows him to his ship.

She never looks back.

000

There are others on the ship, other crackpots and misfits, and it makes her wonder if _she's_ lumped in with them now too.

There's the engineer so spineless she just about melts to jello at a glare or sharp word, and the pretentious preacher with an all-encompassing need to be right, and that kid she's seen down in the Back Bays, eager and annoying as a canid pup. There's even a useless reprogrammed cleaning robot.

"So what does that make _me,_ Vicky?"

"It's _Vicar,_ Ms. Fenhill. And this isn't one of Felix's bootleg dramas."

"But if it was?"

"If it was, you'd be the abrasive asshole who ignores the 'do no harm' principle of your medical training."

"I thought _you_ were the abrasive asshole, Vicky."

Well, maybe the Vicar's right. But she'll never tell him that.

The Captain brings along a shiny sniper rifle he says he dug out of the steaming guts of a Primal back in Emerald Vale. Ellie doesn't believe him. Neither does the Vicar. Felix does, of course, but Parvati's the only one who was with him when he claims it happened, and she's not saying anything.

"I saw… well, Law, Ms. Fenhill, I'm not too sure _what_ I saw. I mean, it _looked _like a Primal and all, but it smelled real bad and I didn't want to get too close to it, you know, on account of all the N-Rays still around it and such, but the Captain did come back with his shiny rifle after our run-in with the beasts, so who knows."

Parvati talks too much, almost more than Felix. She's like a mock-apple pie, all brown and crusty on the outside, but warm and gooey and way too sweet in the middle, liable to turn to mush once too many people start poking in their fingers – and as much as Ellie's irritated by the girl, she doesn't want to stick around when that happens.

The rifle is silver and almost iridescent if looked at in the setting sun, like it's been stripped of its paint or something, and it's modded and rebound and the Captain even _named_ the fucking thing.

"The… Asscrack Expander."

"Yeah. Like it?"

"Captain, with all due respect – _what the fuck?"_

And he laughs and says it's a perfect name, really, because it _does_ tear them a new asshole.

Ellie can't argue with him.

000

The Captain doesn't say much when they camp the night in Roseway. Actually, he doesn't say much at all.

Parvati tells her that before Ellie joined the crew, and even before the Vicar did, the Captain diverted the power to Edgewater _and _convinced the deserters to return.

He also kicked out Reed Tobson.

"I mean, I never really liked Mr. Tobson, to be sure, but I don't think he deserved what he got."

Ellie cleans her pistol in the firelight and takes a sidelong glance at the Captain, on watch over the ridge a ways. She prides herself on three things above all in Halcyon:

Her pistol, her medical prowess, and her ability to keep people at arms length.

Lonely? Maybe. Safe? Always.

"Why? What did he get?"

Parvati frowns. "Exile."

"Hm. That's not so bad, Parvati. I mean, the guy's still alive, right?"

"Well that's just it, Ms. Fenhill. He_ wasn't_ dead. But the Captain kicked him out of town and made him go out into the wilds all alone."

"So? He didn't kill him. Anyone else would have."

"…I think maybe he should have."

Ellie blinks. _"What?"_

"There are worse things than dyin', Ms. Fenhill. Bein' all alone in the world is one of them, especially with monsters all around you in the dark."

Ellie's heart nearly breaks with the crushing truth of that.

000

The Captain says his name is Alex Hawthorne, but the Vicar tells her one night he thinks the man is lying.

It's not in the way he holds himself, Max says. No, the Captain is so sure of himself he could give half his confidence away and _still _have too much. And it's not in the way he handles things either – the Captain is brilliant with his rifle and even better at talking his way out of _– or into –_ situations.

It's the way the young man says his name. A certain coolness, a small dither, a tiny little dip in his voice when he says _Captain Alex Hawthorne._ His charm is undeniable and his ability to lead others, to rally people to his cause, makes Ellie believe that he very well _could_ be Alex Hawthorne, dashing smuggler of some renown.

"His armour is obviously stolen, Ellie. So's his gun. _And_ the ship. And don't you think the real Hawthorne would have enough caps to actually _pay_ his crew?"

She doesn't notice the Vicar's observations. And truthfully, she doesn't care. The Vicar is so uptight about things Ellie's certain his ass must ache all the time from being clenched too fucking tight. The man is like Rizzo's Lemon Slapp – slick and bright-looking, but sour and in denial over fading away to Rizzo's massive Purpleberry line, somehow believing it's special and quietly better than the rest.

He knows a lot without _knowing_ a lot.

"ADA says he's Hawthorne, Vicky, and I've learned long ago not to fuck around with robots," she says, mouth full, leaning back in the kitchen chair to ping another purpleberry crunch nugget at SAM's back.

Max sighs.

000

Ellie's room on the Unreliable is small, with space enough for a desk and some crates and a dress form for her leather jacket when she's not wearing it. And the bed is small, too, but surprisingly more comfortable than any other ship bed she's slept on in the past. She thinks that maybe it's because no one has ever slept in it before.

So she asks him about it one day.

"The bed? I don't know, Els, probably not," he says, stepping over a freshly killed raptidon, wiping acidic blood from his face. "I mean, your room's right beside the kitchen, so I'd think not many people would want everyone to hear them jerking off in the night."

Ellie smirks at the thought, and at the new nickname she's just received. "Well, wouldn't you know?"

Hawthorne blinks. "Know what?"

"If anyone's ever slept in my bed before."

"How the hell should I know?"

"It's your fucking ship."

"I don't pay attention to where people sleep on my ship, Fenhill. I don't give a rat's ass."

"Well, you know where _my_ room is, don't you?"

"That's because I can hear _you_ jerking off in the night. Those prefab walls are thinner than they look."

Ellie smiles.

She doesn't notice the sagging way he says his own name, not like the Vicar does, but she's beginning to suspect that maybe the man_ isn't _from Halcyon.

He spends a lot of time with Max during transit, just listening about the Plan and Laws of the solar system (Scientism? _Really?_). She's caught his fervent tossball debates with Felix over meals (wait, so _how_ many players are on the field?) and the excited rush of Parvati's infodump of corporations and their respective weapons (there's a company called CircusTime? _Really?_).

She's heard his muffled gasp at seeing the infinite starry sky surrounding Scylla for the first time, and he does stare an awful lot at his datapad map.

Also, he says strange things sometimes.

"Uh, Captain?" Felix squints in the ruddy glow of the Last Hope's corner booth. "What's a hot potato?"

"What?"

"A hot potato. You just said _hot potato._"

"What? No I didn't."

"Yeah you did."

"Felix, I –"

"Sorry, Captain, but you _did_ say it," Ellie says, swooping to Felix's rescue before Hawthorne reaches across the table and twists the kid's ear again. "You said, and I quote: _'sounds like Monarch is the love child of a really bad bender and a political hot potato.'_ You then said _'sounds like fun'_ and mentioned _Sublight _and _crazy bitch_ in the same sentence, but I won't tell Lilya."

The Captain frowns and takes a prolonged sip of his Zero Gee, drilling holes with his glare at the eyes around the table in turn.

A long moment passes.

"I didn't say _shit."_

Sometimes there's no arguing with the man.

And its only years later, after all this is done, that he will finally tell Ellie what a potato is. And Ellie will send Felix, wherever he is, a long-range message telling him too.

Felix won't respond.

000

They're on the Groundbreaker refuelling when she first sees him do it. Just a quick little thing, perceptible to no one and nothing but Ellie's sharp eyes.

Hawthorne winces and stops where he is, his fists clenched tight into balls, the skin of his knuckles stretched white over them.

He catches her eye.

"You're hurt?" she says.

"You care?"

"I'm a doctor, smartass. Is it bad?"

"I'm fine. Just a headache. From all this neon and recycled air, you know."

It's a lie and it's a weak one. Her Captain cradles his arm and flexes his hand, rotating his wrist to let the blood move.

"Alex, I'm a pretty damn good doctor."

"Don't be so modest, Els."

"I studied anatomy back in med school. I don't recall any arm ligaments or vessels connecting to the brain."

He says nothing.

"What happened?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters!" she chides, giving him a light shove. "If you're hurting –"

_"I'm fine,"_ he bites, rubbing at his temple. He reaches into his travelling bag and pulls out a bottle with the label ripped off, shakes out the contents, and swallows three pills without any water. "Just a headache. I'm fine."

He walks away.

000

Ellie keeps her distance. Not just from the Captain, but from them all. Just assume everyone's out for themselves and you'll never get taken for a fool. You'll never be disappointed.

She's been told before by another merc on a long-distance hauler once that she was _harder than Chaw and colder than space._ To anyone else that might've been a hurtful thing, but Ellie wore that with pride.

Literally. She had a patch made and sewn onto her leather jacket.

_"Harder than Chaw and colder than space,"_ the Captain mused, squinting at the patch on her shoulder. "Hm. You plan on going public with that slogan, or is your PR team still working on it?"

Felix laughs, nearly choking on his food. Parvati claps his back.

"It's not a slogan, smartass. It's my motto."

"What's a motto, boss?" Felix coughs.

"Nothing, what's a motto with you?"

Ellie would have removed herself from the kitchen if she hadn't only sat down to eat.

"Law, it's like being around a throng of schoolchildren in here," the Vicar snorts, skirting the edge of the kitchen around the childish laughter seizing the room.

"For once I agree, Vicky."

"A motto's a… saying, I guess. Something you, uh, follow. Live by. Max?"

"Hm. Our illustrious leader, ever the silver-tongued charlatan." The Vicar joins them at the table. "A motto is a maxim: a phrase meant to formally summarize the general motivation or intention of an individual, family, social group, or organization."

"There you go, Felix. Clear as mud."

Felix screws his brows. "So your – intention is what, Ellie?"

"I don't know," she shrugs. "Stick to myself. Don't trust anyone as far as you can throw them."

"That's – that's no way to live, Ms. Ellie," Parvati frowns. "Everyone needs something."

"Besides a smoke and some privacy?"

"Our crew's like a machine. All the parts got to work together, else we'll shake ourselves to pieces."

"I'm not really one for metaphors, Parvati."

"We all need each other to work right. We need a medic, and an engineer, and a pilot, and fighters, and someone smart to set things right – that's you, Max – and we need a leader. We can't _all_ be these things. Everyone needs everyone else."

The table is silent for a moment, each ruminating on Parvati's words.

Ellie bristles uncomfortably.

"The only thing_ I_ need is some fucking sleep and for people to stay the hell out of my business."

She leaves her food uneaten and storms away to her room.

The walls are thin indeed, and she hears their murmurs late into the night.

_Don't take it to heart, Parvati._

_Yeah. If that were true, she wouldn't be here._

000

They stop at that derelict station again, the one that looks like a floating piece of shit with frayed wires and bits of space junk floating around it, far away from anything else, right on the edge of the system.

Hawthorne is the only one that exits the _Unreliable_ when they dock here.

Ellie is starting to think there's more to Hawthorne's story than he's willing to let on.

"There is nothing of interest for you here," ADA stoically says when she asks her. "Captain Hawthorne has… private business to attend to."

She's considering making Parvati rewire the damned ship pilot robot thing, just so she can get some answers.

"I would advise against that," the pilot says. "I am hardwired into the _Unreliable_. Removing or altering my code sequences would likely send us plunging into the nearest star."

She gives up on that plan rather quickly.

000

"Hey, Felix."

"Yeah?"

"Wanna hear a joke?"

"Sure."

"Sex."

"…I don't get it."

"I know you don't."

000

Ellie is no stranger to one-night-stands and passing flings, skittering around haulers and cargo liners a good slice of her life, and it's been a long time since she's done anything with anyone. So when they finally land in Stellar Bay, she's quietly thrilled the Captain makes a straightaway for the local bar.

They're supposed to be meeting someone, some hunter who will guide them through the wilderness to their next stop on Hawthorne's increasingly dangerous and seedy secret quest or whatever he wants to call it, and they find her there, smashed far beyond all reasonable limits, and while he's charming her up at the bar, Ellie takes a look around the place.

The stench of fish and sulfur is almost unbearable, and factory smog and cigar smoke makes her eyes water, but that's maybe a good thing, seeing as the 'men' in here are a saltuna can's throw away from being mantisaurs themselves.

"You think the Captain is bent, Ellie?"

Ellie closes her eyes, sighs, and turns halfway to where Felix is seated beside her.

"What are you drinking, Millstone? Of fucking_ course_ the Captain's not bent, look at him."

Felix is the thickest guy she's ever met. Honestly, SAM is programmed to spew cleaning jingles and the robot is brighter than him. Felix reminds her of Tarmac and Cheese – dull, artificially coloured, and the classic baseline meal, always influenced by the addition of something else, be it salt and pepper, or cisty-dogs, or mock-ketchup. Also way too cheesy.

"I know, I mean, he's full of charm and he's smooth and all, and – don't tell him I said this – he's not ugly, either. It's just – I don't know," he shrugged, wincing as the Iceberg whiskey burned its way down his throat. "He's _Captain Hawthorne! _He could have any woman he wants, any one of them here. But he won't, just watch. And he hasn't yet, right? Have you noticed? I think he's gay."

Ellie ruminates on her own Iceberg.

Fuck, the kid is right.

Of all the places they'd been and the people they met, not once has she seen the man slip away with anyone, man or woman. He's not ugly – not at all – and he could charm his way into a marauder's pants if he wanted.

So… _why?_

Maybe it's the alcohol burning through her, or the low ache of need denied too long, or maybe it's just her desire to prove the kid _wrong_ that made her do it.

Anyway, she downs the last of her drink, wipes her mouth, and slides in behind Hawthorne.

"Hey, Cap."

Hawthorne turns slow, eyes lidded and groggy with drink, and gives her a lopsided smile.

"Hey Els. This is Nyoka, our guide."

"The woman you dragged us halfway across the system for?"

"Yeah. She's a hunter, I guess."

"Not just _a_ hunter," Nyoka slurs, "_the_ hunter. And your guide. And I'm gonna – I'm gonna guide the_ fuck_ outta you all, and get you… where you need to go…"

The hunter's head slips from her hand and smacks down onto the bar.

"Charming."

"What do you want, Ellie?"

She huffs. "What do I want? What makes you assume I want anything?"

"The only time you come to me is when you want something."

She frowns. Bites her lip. Tries to look enticing.

"Fine. You caught me."

Not one for words, Ellie reaches up, grabs Hawthorne's unruly hair in her fist, and brings him down to her, kissing him.

It's sloppy and wet and he tastes like cigarettes and rye, but it's… not bad. The heat creeps up her neck and she can feel the Captain kissing back, simply famished, and he slides a warm hand round her waist, and his stubble scratches her lips and her palm, and then she lets go, breathing hard and so is he, and she grins wickedly, stealing his drink, and all she says is, "Fuck, Alex, you kiss like you've been deprived of snatch for a hundred years."

She turns around, back to a wide-eyed, gaping Felix.

Ellie shrugs. "Definitely not bent."

The kid chokes on his whiskey.

000

For being a treacherous, sulfurous, slithering shithole, Monarch is sort of… pretty.

Like Nyoka.

The woman is brash and rude and sinfully sharp all at once, and Ellie loves it. Loves the way she gives no shits, takes no prisoners. Loves how she downs a bottle of Zero Gee before she tears out her machine gun, and how she keeps a bottle of vodka beneath her overcoat, and how effortlessly she can read the terrain, as easily as the Vicar reads his sermons.

She's almost jealous of the woman.

"Shit, the bridge is down," the hunter announces, already reaching for a drink. "We'll make camp here tonight and head on around the river in the morning."

Before Ellie sits to clean her pistol like she does every night, she follows the woman down the bank to the river.

"Hey."

"Hey."

The river flows from the north behind a bluff to pass before them, twisting around the steep banks, and disappears to the south, the beginning and end unseen.

"Beautiful, ain't it?"

"Yeah, sure, I guess. If you ignore the way it burns your skin and the flesh-eating fish in it."

"Hm. You know, I've seen this river a thousand times. Crossed it a thousand more. But I never really thought about it before."

"About what?"

"About where the water came from. About where it's going."

Nyoka uncorks her vodka and takes a long swig.

"I know it's weird. But… lately I've been thinking just how strange it is. I mean, the river's the river, and it's always there. Always will be. But the water flowing through is never the same. And it never stops. It's always changing, always moving."

She swallows down something old and painful, something Ellie can't see.

"Dr. Fenhill –"

"Just Ellie."

"Fine, Just Ellie. Be truthful with me, okay?"

"Sure."

"You think people can change?"

Ellie thinks long and hard on this one.

"I want to say no. I want to say that people are always who they are born as. And that's partly true. I don't know if a man can change himself, but I know that roads can sometimes change you. Walking them always changes you. Sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in big ones. Every step moves you. Closer. Or further away. _Are _you the same? I think so. But I think the way you walk might change."

"And what do you think would happen if you forgot all your roads?"

It's not a question, and she knows it.

Ellie shrugs, lighting up a Stogie Slim, and offering one to the hunter.

"Lost in this wasteland. You must have a better answer than me."

000

The Vicar kills the man behind the walls of Fallbrook, and he's never the same again.

Ellie knows his anger bubbled to the surface sometimes like the sulfur pits around them, but she never thought the priest would coldly murder.

"He's been in prison," Parvati whispers to her. "On Tartarus."

And suddenly a whole lot more makes sense to her now.

000

"Captain, can I have a word with you?"

Hawthorne looks like he might just piss himself, or vomit. Or maybe both, which would be funny.

"Sure. What's up?"

Ellie makes him sit down on the other stool across from her. She's sucking back another Stogie and hands him one. He takes it, and she notices his trembling hands. Been noticing that a lot lately.

"A couple things, actually," she begins. "First – I want to talk about my debt. I've paid it off, I reckon."

"You reckon?"

"Yeah, I do. Now, I've been thinking, and yes, I'll stay on as your medic and hired gun, but no, I won't do it for five-hundred bits. I'll take no less than a thousand."

"Right."

"Per week."

He whistles. "Steep."

"It's a steal, considering I saved your ass from that mantiqueen acid today. Tell me of any other medic in the system who could've done better. I'll wait."

"Seven-fifty?"

"Nine hundred."

"Eight."

"Eight-fifty."

"Eight."

She smirks, shaking his hand. "Sure. Figure I'd stay awhile, make sure you don't get yourself killed. I actually don't hate you, despite what you may think. Glad I'll still be kicking around."

"Likewise."

"Plus I'll be getting first dibs on whatever loot we come across – after you, of course."

"Then you better start washing your goddamned dishes after you use them."

"That's what SAM is for, isn't it?"

He laughs, and then he sucks in a sharp breath, clutching at his head.

Her eyes narrow.

"That's the second thing, Alex."

His eyes narrow back.

"You gotta tell me what the hell is going on with you."

He grunts, pulling out that unlabelled bottle and downing about five of those pills.

"Nothing."

"I don't have time for this, Captain. It's getting worse, I can see it. You and I both know the only reason that mantiqueen spit on you is because you had a spell and just about passed out."

He rubs at his brow. "You… wouldn't understand."

"I'm a fucking doctor. Try me."

He grinds his teeth, thinking of a way to word it all.

"I… think I have hibernation sickness."

Ellie blinks. "What?"

"Yeah."

"You… you were in stasis? When? For how long?"

"From – Hesperides," he says, denoting the mining asteroid a few light-years away. "I didn't want to be awake for the journey, so I hopped aboard a passenger ferry and slept it away."

She's not sure if he's lying to her or not, because he won't meet her eye, but she reckons there must be a grain of truth somewhere in there.

"Well. For hibernation sickness I'd recommend drinking plenty of fluids and taking it easy, neither of which you ever do."

"Right."

"I'd also suggest we pick up some reactive kinematics next time we're on Groundbreaker. Might make your headaches and limb pain a bit less severe."

"Sounds expensive."

"Nothing a captain with a paying crew can't afford."

He smiles, massaging and flexing his arm. "Thanks, Els."

She deflects. "Hey, it's in my best interest to keep you alive now."

"Sure."

It hangs in the air between them now, heavy and unspoken, yet practically screaming in their faces.

"Is there… something else you wanted to talk to me about?"

Fuck him.

She sighs, feeling a headache of her own encroaching.

"Look, Cap, about the other night in that bar – I was drunk and hard up and Felix said you were bent and I needed to prove him wrong. That's all that was."

"Hm. Right," he begins, a slick smile sliding up his face. "That's all it was."

"Truer words have never been spoken."

"So did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Prove him wrong?"

"Well shit, I think so. I mean, you kiss like a horny teenager, but not a gay horny teenager, you know?"

"Thanks, my fragile ego is shattered."

"Fuck off, Cap, your ego is so big it makes a Primal's dick look small."

He laughs. Then she laughs.

"Really, Alex, I – apologise," she manages. "It won't happen again."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I don't do touchy-feely, alright? And I most _definitely_ don't do crewmembers and captains. Too messy."

"What, you afraid of catching feelings or something?"

"No, I'm afraid of nothing, I'll have you know. But I'm not too keen on getting a knife between my ribs, if you catch my drift."

"I do. _Harder than Chaw and colder than space._"

"Exactly."

"Doesn't it ever get tiring? Don't you ever get lonely?"

"Nah. That's what alcohol and quickies are for."

"I mean – personally. Don't you ever feel _alone?"_

"What, you mean like friends? Like getting all mushy and warm and confiding your sins? Having someone to talk to?"

"Sure."

"We're talking right now."

"I know."

She paused, and he smirked.

"Goodnight, Els."

He got up and left, but not before snatching the Stogie from between her numb fingers.

000

Ellie dreams.

Or rather, she has nightmares.

It's the same one she's been having a while now, the one where she's on _Groundbreaker _peddling her contract or something equally boring, and then the pack of feral canids show up and chase her down, biting at her ankles, gaining on her and gaining on her. _Groundbreaker_ dissolves and she's in Byzantium again, outside the university, the polished metal and stone almost making her blind. She turns then, and the pack of canids melts into her parents, into marauders and spacers, into the crew of the _Silvercove_, into Caster.

She awakes in a cold sweat and reminds herself why she's hard as Chaw and cold as space.

000

"You should style your hair, Vicky. I think a nice faux hawk could give you that _don't fuck with me_ vibe you're working on, you know?"

"I mostly use my face for that."

000

They get a scare when Felix and Nyoka drag Hawthorne through the gates of Fallbrook, bleeding and unconscious.

"A goddamned _monster _of a raptidon!" Nyoka wheezes, a sordid blend of horror and ecstasy in her voice as she helps Ellie and the rest of the crew haul him onto the bed of their rented house. "A legendary beast!"

"Is he – is he – is he gonna be okay, Doc?" Felix trembles, pale as a sprat.

"I'm not sure, kid, it doesn't look too good right now –"

"Doctor."

She blinks up at Max and then at Felix, who looks about ready to pass out himself.

"Right. Uh, yeah, he's fine, Felix. Why don't you go back to the landing pad and grab some water and adreno and extra bandages for me, alright? Parvati, you go too."

Felix nods, and vacates the cramped room with the engineer.

"How bad is he really, doctor?"

She pries off his bloodied and melted armour with deft fingers, and the Vicar helps, and Nyoka takes a swig of her vodka to calm her trembling hands before she assists them as well.

"Ah. Not too good. The rapt must have been really fucking angry with you guys."

"Ha! Understatement of the century, Fenhill, you should've seen it! The monster was asleep and the Captain wanted to go round it, but Felix and I knew we could take it on – turns out the thing was down the hill a whole lot farther than we thought, 'cause it comes barrelling up towards us and it's getting bigger and bigger and it's calling all it's other rapt friends, right? And –"

"You should've listened to him, Nyoka," the Vicar seethes. "You should have left the beast well alone and traversed as far as you could around it like the Captain said."

"Now look here, preacher, I ain't one to run from a good hunt –"

"Just – leave."

"I –"

_"Leave!"_

The hunter tosses her empty bottle on the floor a little too aggressively and groans. "Whatever. I'm gettin' drunk."

The Vicar sighs, catching Ellie's eye. "That wouldn't have happened if Nyoka wasn't drunk and Felix wasn't so impressionable."

"I know."

The Captain gained a few days bedrest and a badass scar from it all, and Max and Ellie gained a new appreciation for the other and an unspoken resolution: _one of us must always be there with the Captain. For his own fucking sake._

000

Ellie reads in her spare time.

Not that she has much spare time, mind you, but on quiet nights aboard the Unreliable when Nyoka passes out early and Felix's serials end sooner than he thought, she reads.

Not boring old textbooks like the Vicar has stacked to the ceiling of his room – no, she's read enough of those in her youth to last her a lifetime. And she doesn't read heroic tales and comics like Felix and Parvati do, the ones with overly-characterised tropes and impossible situations with their always happy endings.

No. She reads poetry.

She downloads poems of all types from the Aetherwave onto her datapad and keeps them in several layers of folders so no one could ever accidentally stumble upon them by accident.

Except the Captain, of fucking course.

"What's this, Els?"

And she nearly has a heart attack when he pops his head from her doorway, datapad in hand.

She's never flown so fast from the kitchen and into her room in her life.

"What the _fuck_ do you think you're doing?"

"Looking for my datapad," he staggers as Ellie slams the bedroom door shut behind her. "I can't find it."

"Why the hell do you think _I'd_ have it?"

"I don't know, you're the one dealing with our inventory and manifests, so I figured –"

"Well I don't, okay, so you can just fuck off now."

She snatches the datapad from his hand and he smiles a deadly smile.

"I didn't know you read poetry, Ellie."

_Architect, strike me down now._

"I don't, okay? It's – it's from my mom, she sends me stuff sometimes."

"No she doesn't. You haven't spoken to your mother in years."

"I don't – I mean I never – I –"

"It's okay, Els," he says, and all she wants to do is smack that stupid smirk off his stupid face. "I knew you were a romantic deep down, somewhere. Very deep."

"You –"

"We all have our kinks. Max jerks off to his god or whatever, Felix to his tossball stick, and I've caught Parvati dry-humping the fusion reactor once or twice. Okay, that's a lie. But I've seen Nyoka do it. I just thought yours was your leather jacket or your switchblade or something, not Homer's Odyssey."

Ellie runs a hand over her face. "I would rather melt into the floor than be having this conversation with you right now."

"You know what _my_ kink is?"

"I don't care."

"Leather jackets and switchblades."

"Don't fucking test me, Hawthorne, I swear to all the gods –"

He ducks under her swing and slips out the door, locking the door to his own room tight behind him.

May be the smartest thing he's ever done.

She gets a ping from her datapad as she's just getting into bed, from Hawthorne.

_Els._

_Found my datapad. Left it by ADA's console, oops._

_Found something you might like._

There's a link to an Aetherwave article and a poem she's read before, _Song of Myself _by Walt Whitman, an old Earth poet. It's sweet but she's read it before.

She reads it again.

Another ping on her datapad, another message from the Captain.

_Els._

_I read it. Nice, if a little flowery and long. I especially liked this part:_

_'All goes onward and outward, and nothing collapses,_

_And to die is different from what anyone supposed,_

_And luckier.'_

_What do you think that means?_

Ellie sends off her own message.

_It means go the fuck to sleep Alex, we have a long day tomorrow._

She hesitates, then sends another one.

_It means everything we do in life is meaningless. Whether we choose to be a doctor or choose to be a smuggler doesn't matter. We all end up dead at the end of it._

He sends back:

_But we choose. That's the difference._

000

Nyoka simply collapses in front of the five graves before her.

A pang of guilt rips through Ellie's heart for the woman.

She's quiet that night at camp, and they both keep an eye on her, fearful she might wander off and drown herself in alcohol or the river. But she's asleep now, breathing in deep, steady breaths for perhaps the first time in a very long time.

Ellie respects the woman immensely, even considers her a not-quite-friend-but-almost-maybe-close-enough. They just _get _each other, but this – this is beyond her comprehension.

How could someone so strong be so utterly _weak? _How could she let those people shake her to her very core? Make her linger on this planet for far too long, make her see ghosts in corners and guilt in every blade of grass?

"It doesn't make you weak," Hawthorne whispers, careful not to wake the hunter. "It makes you stronger."

"I don't see how."

"They were a team of six. Six guns are better than one."

"Unless the others are all pointed at your back."

He ignores her. "But it's not only that – they made each other stronger. They helped one another. Became better people. And now that they're gone – Nyoka will be stronger than before, and not because she only needs to worry about food enough for her, but because she lived through it all and can take that with her. They were her family. But I think she's found a new one now."

"I still don't get it."

"I hope someday you do."

000

Hiram Blythe is a fucking asshole. So is Graham, and Sanjar, and Catherine, and everyone else on this stinking shithole of a planet.

They all want something from them, from the Captain: Hiram wants his broadcast tower, Graham wants a revolution, Sanjar wants a promotion, and Catherine – well, Catherine wants to get into Hawthorne's pants, plain as day, but she also wants control of everything on Monarch under Sublight's greasy thumb.

"Fuck her. Fuck him. Fuck them _all," _she spits, kicking at the already rotting door of the derelict prefab house they're camped in.

Hawthorne smirks. "Jesus, Els, you're so wound up. Maybe you should rub one off. Me and Nyoka will plug our ears, honestly."

"Speak for yourself, Captain."

"Ha."

"Doesn't this _bother _you?"

"Doesn't what bother me?"

"This! All of this! These pricks asking for handouts all the time! And you – you're just giving them what they want. Always. Why?"

Nyoka passes him a cigarette and he lights it, shrugging. "I need their help."

"No you don't. You don't need _anyone's_ help, Alex. Fuck them all. Let's just leave this fucking place, run some Sublight contracts. You don't need to get involved with the Iconoclasts and MSI."

"I do."

_"Why?"_

"What's this _really_ about Ellie?"

Ellie fumes and Nyoka gets the hint.

"This is way too hot for me, and I ain't drunk enough to deal with theatrics. I'm taking point," she says, stumbling out of the prefab.

The door slams shut.

"So?"

"I just – I don't get it. Why you're doing all this for everyone. Why you need their help."

"There's… something I'm involved in. Something I need. Something big. I need information to get it. Hiram has that information. He needs his broadcast tower to deliver that information, and MSI and the Iconoclasts are junking up the airwaves with their propaganda."

"Deliver it to who?"

"That's all you need to know."

Ellie is not satisfied, not in the slightest.

"What's this _something big?_ I want in."

Hawthorne laughs. "No, you really don't."

She runs a hand through her short hair. "Fine. Fine. Whatever. Fine."

"I get the feeling it's not fine, Els."

"Just – be careful, Cap. That's all I'll say. Nothing's free in this universe or the next one. Don't give them more than you take."

"Balance, then. Smart."

"No, not balance. Entropy."

"Entropy. How so?"

"Be unpredictable. Have no order or reason to it all. Make them guess."

"Descend into chaos, you mean."

"Yeah. Maybe a little bit."

Ellie bites her lip, then finally takes a seat beside her Captain.

"I fell in love once. To a ship captain."

Hawthorne's eyes widen.

"His name was Caster. Dashing, roguish, handsome, he had it all. He had my contract for six years on his ship the _Silvercove,_ too_._ A smaller C-class freighter. I was the crew's medic, fresh out of school, my first real placement. There was nine of us."

Some beast howls in the night outside.

"We docked at _Groundbreaker_ one day to unload a shipment, and the mardets come and arrest me. I spent three fucking months in that cell, and not once did any of them come back for me."

"How did you get out?"

"I bribed the guard."

"With what?"

She doesn't answer that. She doesn't need to.

"Spent the next year searching for the _Silvercove._ Found it on Terra 2, in some backwater skug-hole of a town called Wellspring. Walked in on Caster fucking some whore. First thing he says to me is _"How did you find out about your bounty?"_ My what? My fucking bounty put out by my parents, back before they decided to entirely give up on me."

They're silent for a moment.

"So, what happened?"

She lights a cigarette in the growing dark, shrugging.

"I killed him."

They're silent for a moment more.

"Point is, Cap, people are monsters. They'll eat you alive if you don't eat them first."

"So, what, that's it then?"

"What?"

"The tale of Ellie Fenhill? Hard as Chaw and cold as space?"

"What about it?"

"You were sold for a few bits and caught your man cheating on you. Is that _really_ enough to turn into such a cold-hearted bitch?"

She thinks she should be a lot angrier than she is, but she's simply not.

"It's a good start, yeah."

"Right."

"It's more than that. It's being around smugglers and mercs and spacers all your life that makes you cold. You have to be. You've gotta have nothing, cause then no one can take anything from you."

"But then there's no one to watch your back. Death could come a lot swifter that way."

She shrugs again. "That's the good part of dying – when you've got nothing to lose, you can run any risk you want. Like taking up space on a stolen ship led by a man from out of the system. Who's also conversing with a wanted fugitive."

Hawthorne smirks bitterly. "Hey, you said it, not me."

"So it's true, then. You're talking to Welles."

"Who spilled?"

"ADA. Sort of."

"Fucking robots, I swear."

"And you're not really Alex Hawthorne."

"I am now."

She looks at him – at his stupid smile and his unruly hair, and his keen eyes that always look too closely at things.

"Who are you, really?"

"Look – the things I've done have all been real. And the _Unreliable_ – that's real too. Max and Parvati and Felix and Nyoka and ADA and SAM and you – it's all real. Nothing's been a lie."

"Except your name."

"I guess. But that's real now too."

Ellie sighs. There are some things in the universe not meant to be known. There's a time to let things go, and she had a feeling this was one of those times.

A smile plays at her lips.

"So, you're saying your embarrassingly low tolerance for alcohol is real then? And your pathetic aim with any weapon that's not a rifle?"

"Sadly, this is true."

"And your terrible kissing, I suppose."

"Hey, that's not fair. You caught me off guard and it – it's been a while."

"How long? A fucking century?"

"Ha. Just about."

"If you say so," she laughs, and then it happens.

A change in the air, a sudden weight, a heavy friction as something else, something _more_ slides into place and settles there. She sees it in his eyes first, and then in his features, and she thinks he might see it in her, too, mirrored back.

"Alex –"

He leans in and kisses her.

This time it's a little softer, a little less messy, and it utterly fogs her brain, and she's unable to do anything but what she really wants to do deep down, and that is kiss him back.

So she does.

_No._

Then she pulls back.

"Alex, I can't –"

He ignores her, kissing her harder than before, as if that would make her forget that she can't for whatever reason, as if that might push the faces of others, the face of Caster, from her mind.

It does.

And anything that does, she takes.

He surprises her with a groan that claws its way up his throat, and an urgency overtakes him, his skin twitching with a frenzy he'd only ever felt when he was losing a fight.

It overtakes her too, and she's pressing herself into him, her leg curling around his. She groans back, and nudges him down, and she rolls with him, the pressure of his body now impossible to ignore.

_No._

Both of her hands cup his face now, her lips moving across his with an experienced fervour he couldn't possibly hope to match, not after so long. He places a hand on her waist, and she kisses his jaw, his neck, bites his shoulder, kisses with her entire body rocking into him in waves, her bony hips jutting against his own. It's almost too much.

She nudges a knee between his legs and feels him hard, straining against his bodysuit, and then –

She stops.

_No._

No no no.

It's too much, too close, she can't, not with him, not with her Captain –

"Els?" he breathes under her. "Ellie, what's wrong?"

_This,_ she wants to scream. _All of this._

She untangles herself from him and practically jumps away, as if she'd been burned, but the places his skin had been are cold, and she shivers.

"I – nothing's wrong, Cap, I just – I can't. This was a mistake."

"It's not, Ellie, I –"

"It _is._ I don't do crewmembers or – or captains, I told you. Things get too messy."

She grabs her gun from the chair, wipes her mouth, and stares down at him on the floor.

"I'm sorry."

She leaves the prefab and doesn't come back until morning.


	2. Chapter 2

Ellie fucks the man who bought her a drink at the bar in Fallbrook.

It's not that she didn't want to – the guy was charming and handsome and rugged, a real adventurer, a thrill seeker, only in town for a short while, then moving on to greater, unknown things, like herself. And it's not because she had no desire to – it _had_ been quite a while, she supposed, and a girl has her needs too, you know.

It was because she _needed_ to, to prove to herself… _something. _She's not quite sure yet. Maybe that she doesn't need anybody, doesn't need anybody needing _her._

"You know, he looks an awful lot like a certain captain," Nyoka muses, somehow annoyingly already over her hangover. "A certain ship captain we both know."

And fuck it, but the hunter is right.

"No he fucking doesn't," she argues, but not with enough bite to it. She sits down beside the hunter on the front porch of their rented house, and she shivers in the morning air. "He looks nothing like the Captain."

"Sure, sure, whatever helps you sober up. Speaking of – here," she says, handing Ellie a bottle of some foul-smelling brown sludge. "It's no Caffenoid, but it'll do the trick."

It tastes like sprat piss. She tells Nyoka that.

"It _is_ sprat piss, Fenhill."

"Ew. Fucking gross."

"I'm only shitting you, Doc."

"Fine."

She takes another sip.

"It's actually sprat jizz."

Ellie throws the bottle into the street, with the laughing of a certain asshole hunter piercing the quiet morning.

Then Hawthorne sways out the front entrance of the bar across the street, blinking in the sunlight.

Catherine Malin comes out after him, a little too close. She's smiling that smile she gives people when they try to dip out of their Sublight contracts, only more feral. She hooks her fingers round his belt hoops, and then she leans up and whispers something in his ear, and the way her hand travels down his side is much too friendly. He whispers something back, and that makes her smile turn downright predatory, and then she ushers him away, but not before she blatantly gives his ass a good squeeze. She watches him go down the steps, akin to a raptidon hunting down its prey.

Hawthorne notices his crew on the porch, and tries to look like he's going in some other direction, anywhere but there. He fails miserably, curves away out towards the waterfall, rubs his neck awkwardly.

Something like anger begins to simmer inside Ellie's chest.

And she doesn't know why – she has no hold on the man, no claim to him, and she knows that – she_ told_ him that – and yet she can't hide the severe scowl she pitches at his back.

"Hm. Y'know," Nyoka begins, "Catherine looks an awful lot like a certain sawbones me and the Captain both know."

Ellie's stomach churns in deep knots, and she doesn't think it has anything to do with the sprat jizz.

000

"So… you and the Captain –"

"Shove it, Felix, I don't want to talk about this with you."

"About what? I was only going to say it seems like you're angry at him or something. What did he do?"

_"Catherine,"_ she snaps, and Felix's eyes go wide with understanding.

000

Hawthorne leaves her on the ship this time.

And she gets it, she really does. Nyoka is their guide, after all, and truly, Ellie needs some down time. Max goes with them, as per their silent agreement.

But fuck it if she isn't _bored._

She putters around the _Unreliable,_ secretly eating cans of boarstwurst and tileritos, and buffing her pistol – again – and shooing SAM out of her room as he attempts to sneak in and clean the clutter.

She even goes down the landing pad and wanders around Fallbrook, after managing to shake Parvati and Felix. She takes in the enormous waterfall, and the dazzling lights in the grotto, and she makes small talk with some of the residents there, maybe covertly scouting out leads on jobs for the crew.

She turns the corner and almost collides with the adventurer she screwed the other night.

"Oh – hey… _you,"_ she manages, entirely forgetting the man's name. Boris? Benson? Something.

"Booker," he smirks. "And you're Ellie. See, I can remember a good shag."

"Right."

"Care for a drink? I'll buy."

"Sure. Not in the mood to schtup, though, so if that's your poison, better look elsewhere."

"Nah, me neither. I mean, not just yet. I paint my best pictures at night, if you know what I mean."

"Please don't use that line on anybody ever again."

She drinks away the afternoon with him, hearing about his reckless adventures and his speedy little ship and all the fake monsters he's slain, and she ends up in bed with him anyway, drunk once again, high on the feeling of forgetting about Hawthorne for a while.

Only, she _doesn't_ forget about him. In fact, it's all she can do to look away from Booker as he's slamming into her, over and over. His hair is short like the Captain's but not quite short enough for her. His skin is tanned but not as dark as the Captain's, either. He has scars riddled across his chest but not in the same places as Hawthorne's. And the way he says her name, soft and urgent all at once, is almost how she imagines Alex might say her name were he here, but still, _not quite._

And she's _furious_ at him for that.

000

"ADA, what are the chances you'll let me take the ship offworld?"

"Zero."

"Just to do a couple Sublight runs? Only while Hawthorne is out."

"Zero."

"I'll buy you a brand new coupler – "

"No."

"And make Parvati install it –"

"Nope."

"Fuck, you're no fun."

000

Parvati fixes her pistol without telling her, and Ellie is _furious._

"The fuck is this, Holcomb? Thought I told you I didn't want you touching any of my stuff."

The girl winces and lets a wrench slip through her fingers, clattering away beneath the thrumming engine.

"Oh! Oh, I mean, I'm _mighty_ sorry, Miss Fenhill!" she stammers, wiping the sweat and grease from her brow. "I – I know you said not to do anythin' to it, but it – I mean your slide, it warn't fully recoilin', and it was due for a new spring, so I… only took a little look at it, see, and popped a new one in for you."

Ellie sighs, running a hand through her hair. "Fine. It's done now, I guess. How much do I owe you?"

Parvati blinks. "Owe? Oh, Law, Doc, it don't cost nothin'. I had a spare spring in my back pocket, see."

"Everything's got a price, Parvati."

"No, truly, it don't cost you a thing. I won't take nothin' from you, on account of bein' crew and all."

Ellie eyes the engineer warily.

Parvati doesn't notice.

"You take real good care of your pistol, Dr. Fenhill. I see you oil it almost every night."

"I oughta. It's kept me alive this long."

"I mean you treat it nice. Makes me happy to see, 'cus I feel the same way 'bout my wrench."

"Look, it's a tool that does a job. Feeling's got nothing to do with it."

"Oh, I don't believe that for a second, Doc. I mean, it's saved your life more than any person in the system, right? It's been everywhere with you, through every fight 'n lazy day, too. And it's right there, right against your side, closer than anyone. Almost like people, ain't it?"

Ellie looks down at her pistol.

It carried her through all her battles. Killed dozens of people that might otherwise have killed her. It ended Caster's life. It's been with her longer than her days spent in Byzantium. Been here longer than her parents. And it's never let her down.

Ellie shrugs. "Huh. Yeah, maybe a little."

"You know," Parvati says, "you oughta name it. I name all my favourite tools."

"Why?"

"It's _people._ People need a name. I've been thinking, what about Virginia?"

"For my gun? You just come up with that out of the blue?"

"I might've been thinkin' 'bout it for a while. But I mean, it's okay if you don't like it!"

Ellie smiles, running her fingers down the worn silver barrel softly.

An old friend.

"Actually, it's perfect. Virginia it is."

Huh.

The kid might not be so bad, after all.

A new friend.

000

"You know I grew up in the Back Bays, right Doc?"

"Yeah, Millstone, you still reek like it too."

"Har har. But listen, I wanna tell you something."

"Shoot."

"Growing up, I had people all around me. Spacers, junkies, other orphans, everyone on the _Groundbreaker,_ I guess. I was always surrounded by people. Good people, bad people, people kinda in-between. And I didn't mind it, 'cause I used to think the worst thing in life was to be alone. Live alone, die alone, you know. But, well, it's not. The worst thing in life is to be surrounded by people who make you _feel_ alone. And I didn't realise till I left, but…"

Felix pauses, looking out across the Monarch wilderness. He shrugs. "It's nice to finally not feel alone."

Ellie's chest tightens.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I get it kid. Me too."

000

Booker groans deep, fully spent, then collapses on the bed beside her.

"Hey… you didn't come?"

"Nah, I'm just… tired, is all."

"Wasn't me, then?"

No, she says, which is true and false all at once.

"Good. Good. Hey, can I ask you something?"

Ellie reaches over to the bedside table and lights up a Stogie Slim, sucking deep.

"Sure."

"You want to come with me?"

She snorts. "Fuck, my man, do you have some stamina."

"No, not like that," he chuckles, taking a drag of her stogie and handing it back. "I mean, do you want to come_ away_ with me. On my ship."

Ellie's heart stops a moment.

"I mean, the ship's a good one, if a little cramped, and it'll just be the two of us, but I could really use a sawbones onboard. And some company. It gets a little lonely out in space, you know."

"Yeah. I know."

And Ellie really, truly considers it.

In any other reality, she might flat-out refuse. Construct some excuse as to why she can't go, some vague reason to mask her flakiness, her circumspect. But she doesn't this time.

Because she _could_ go with him. She could be his second, his partner in crime. They could traverse the cosmos together, free from debts, from blood-sucking parents, running contracts across the stars.

And despite the fact it sounded something like a relationship, she knows the man won't hold her to that standard. He's cut from the same cloth as she is, after all.

It wouldn't be a bad life.

But… he's simply _too similar_ to someone else, and she can't do that to him. To herself.

She can't forever live a life of _not quite._

She sighs, wishing she were in some other timeline, perhaps, one where she maybe never let the Captain square her debt with Jessie in the Med Bay.

"I can't," she concedes. "I've already got another ship. Another Captain."

He nods, and maybe he already knows. "Yeah. I figured. Had to ask, though. But next time we meet, you're buying the booze."

She smiles, maybe a little sad. "Sure."

"There's something about it, you know. I think people like you and me aren't meant for all that. Like dust motes, I think, blowing around all accidental-like in the breeze."

"Ha. Like entropy, you mean. The degree of disorder or randomness in a system. I know a priest who might argue with that. Say we all have a purpose here, a destiny or something."

Booker smiles, and it almost breaks her heart.

"Well, maybe it's a little bit of both."

000

Ellie does not hold on to grudges, doesn't let people sink their teeth in, grab hold of her with their bony fingers and make her think and wonder. She has neither room nor time for such things.

And yet… she simply can't shake Hawthorne. Can't push him from her mind, no matter how hard she scrubs her pistol, or how deep she delves into her poetry, or how loud she moans when Booker is fucking her. He's burrowing into her mind like a parasite, and she's beginning to wonder how long before it kills her.

Exhibit A of _Why Ellie Doesn't Do Crewmembers or Captains: _

Things get too messy.

And there is nothing particularly spectacular about the man, absolutely nothing that should hook her in, make her falter, plague her mind. Booker is just as good-looking, just as cutthroat charming and confident. Max is smarter. Felix is bolder. Parvati is better with machines. Nyoka is better at most things.

The only thing he's good at is telling lies and leading them nowhere.

000

They anger a particularly large band of marauders and leave Monarch for a while, at least until things cool down on the ground. Catherine pretty much kicks them out of Fallbrook with her steel-toe boots.

They orbit around the moon passively, and Ellie's in the control room, watching the opaline storms on Olympus rage violently on in an unending battle with itself, Monarch an almost infinitesimal speck revolving around the vast kaleidoscope that is the gas giant – and the gas giant is, in itself, a mote of dust in the undying darkness of space.

So what does that make _her?_

She hears his footsteps before he comes to stand beside her, yet that doesn't stop the uncomfortable bristle when he says her name.

"Hey, Ellie."

Ellie. Not Els.

"Hey."

_"Wow._ It's… remarkable, isn't it? So dangerous. Feels like we're standing right on the edge of the void."

"Hm. Nah, this isn't the edge. You ever been right to the very end of the system, out on the fringe? Have you ever stood and stared out into the nothingness?"

"No."

"Makes you feel small."

"Like this?" he gestures out to Olympus, so utterly vast they cannot see the stars past its girth.

"Smaller."

"Hm. Well. It sort of makes me feel big. Like I'm a part of all this. You'll have to show me one day."

"Right."

She wonders how long it will take before he leaves – she cannot stand this idle small talk, these empty words filling the empty room.

She can't even stand to look at his face any more, and she's angrier at herself than at him, because it's foolish and she cannot fathom why.

He hasn't mentioned that night in the prefab, and neither has she, nor the morning after they both lost themselves in someone else – in fact, she has barely spoke a word to the man since – but it's still there, that deep shift in gravity, that slide into _more,_ and the simple knowledge of it vibrates like static between them, putting her on edge. They revolve around each other like Monarch around Olympus, unstable in its orbit.

"I'm going to convince Zora to supplant Graham," he says, still gazing out into the storm.

Ellie blinks. "What? Why?"

"Graham is going to launch an attack on Stellar Bay. He's leading the Iconoclasts to their death. Zora won't."

"So?"

Now it's _his_ turn to blink.

"Didn't you hear? He's going to get them all killed."

"I heard you loud and clear."

"And?"

"And who cares. Let them fight it out," she seethes. "Last one standing wins. Maybe they all deserve it."

He opens his mouth like he's going to say something, then closes it. Makes for the door.

Then he decides to open it again.

"See, that's your problem, Fenhill. You think you're being rebellious by leaving it all behind, but you're a walking billboard of Board propaganda."

Ellie grinds her teeth and rounds on him.

"What the fuck did you call me?"

_"This,"_ he hisses, gesturing at Ellie's whole being. "This… whole lone wolf, dissident, survival of the fittest mentality is word-for-word Board doctrine."

"You better explain yourself Hawthorne, right fucking _now."_

"Explain?" he huffs. "You want me to explain? Fine, I will. Of fucking _course_ you believe that the strong survive and the weak are never worthy of living – because that's _exactly_ what gave you the high-class life you had in the first place, what Byzantium was built on, and your fucking selfishness means you embrace that wholeheartedly."

"You don't know a fucking thing about what I went through to get here."

"Oh, I don't?"

"Fuck off. Go fuck your Sublight whore again – what's her name, Catherine itty-bitty tits?"

"At least she's done _something_ with her life."

"Fuck you."

"No, fuck _you,_ Ellie _fucking _Fenhill," he spits, catching her off guard. "You refuse to see the only reason you were able to leave is because of your fucking social class, not because you were any good at it. You're just some rich girl playing make-believe out of unearned _boredom._ You still have that greed, that – that _callousness _that infects the entire upper class like a fucking disease. Every one of those people down there work harder in a day than you have your entire life – they've built roads, and cities, and done more for the system than someone like you could ever understand."

_"Someone like me?"_

"Yeah, _someone like you._ Someone who's been given everything and yet it's_ still_ not enough. You can't shake your selfishness for long enough to see that - yet you don't care. Their lives are somehow worth _less _than yours?"

Ellie can hardly breathe with the violent bitterness blistering across her skin. Bitterness, and maybe something a little too close to shame.

"I_ never_ said that."

"Fine, maybe not _less,_ but not worthy of giving a single fuck about."

"I've kicked people's ass for far less, Hawthorne. I'm not afraid to fuck you up."

He flashes his fist upward like he might clout her himself, and she shrinks back – infinitesimally – but he sees it.

"Just a fucking show," he spits, lowering his fist. "Everything about you is a sham."

He goes to leave but pauses in the doorway, turning back to her. There's disgust in his eyes – something she's seen from other people, and yet she cannot remember being so _injured_ by it.

"You're always on about how you're nothing like them, like your parents – how the wealthy and the corporations are all just husks without souls or any human feelings – but you're the coldest fucking person I've ever met. _Absolute fucking zero."_

And he leaves her all alone in the control room, with nothing but the storm of Olympus, and beyond, the icy blackness of nothing, behind her.

000

Ellie has that dream again.

That _nightmare_ again.

But this time, when the rabid canids usually dissolve into her parents and Caster, they don't. Instead, they all melt away and Hawthorne is standing there in the white streets of Byzantium.

"You're cold, Ellie," he says, the disgust on his face again. "Cold, cold, cold. Absolute zero."

He slams his hand on the _Unreliable's_ airlock release, and she's sucked out into the velvet of space, so frigid and hollow that she floats there forever.

_Harder than Chaw and colder than space._

000

The _Unreliable _touches back down on Fallbrook's landing pad, and Ellie leaves.

Or, she tries to.

"Where are you going?" Hawthorne says, suited up and checking over his rifle by the lockers. Nyoka is gearing up too, and sliding a few bottles of Zero Gee beneath her overcoat for good measure.

Ellie has what little belongings she brought along, her entire world packed into a single bag.

"Not sure yet."

And it's true – she could try work for that greasy little sprat, Nelson. Or she could get some runs from Catherine, however hard it might be to look her in the face and not see _herself._ Or maybe she'd go find Booker, and take him up on his offer.

"We're gonna check out the UDL gunship that crash-landed out by Bolpock's Ridge," Nyoka says. "If looters haven't already stripped it clean – I _told_ you we should have gone sooner, Cap –"

"Yeah, yeah, you're right, I'm wrong, we all know," he smirks, waving her off.

"It's about goddamned time you realised that, Hawthorne."

Hawthorne notices the way Ellie's hesitating in the doorway, unsure.

"Well? Get suited up, Fenhill. We've got to get there and back by nightfall. Don't want another mantiqueen trying to chew my ass off again."

"What, you didn't have fun last time?"

"Hey, I know _your_ idea of a good time involves face-melting acid and alcohol, Nyoka, but that's not mine. Not the mantiqueen kind, anyhow."

They leave, and Ellie flounders like a saltuna.

Only a moment.

"I'm not –?"

"Not ready? Yeah, I know. Hurry up Ellie, Nyoka's going to start punching some innocent civilians soon."

A tiny smile plays at her lips.

She drops her bag and grabs her pistol instead.

This time, there is no hesitation.

000

Her datapad pings.

_Ellie._

_I'm sorry for what I said, back in the control room. Didn't really mean it. I was tired and frustrated we were in orbit while marauders picked over that crash site. I shouldn't have lost my cool. Won't happen again._

_It must have taken some real guts to leave everything behind like you did. It couldn't have been easy to leave the safety of Byzantium's walls for the unknown, for the constant threat of death. Not many people could do that, no matter why they did it._

_If it's any consolation, if the people of Halcyon were half as stubborn as you, maybe they wouldn't be in such a mess._

She sends back:

_Thanks. I figure it's because Halcyon is half as annoying as you. So, we good?_

_Deserved that, _he pings. _Yeah,_ _we good._

000

"So, Max. Got any interesting prison stories? Do you really trade cigarettes and blowjobs like bits?"

"I told you, I wasn't technically in prison. And no. You watch way too many Aetherwave dramas."

"Got any recipes for bathtub hooch? I've always wanted to try the real stuff."

_"No._ And we didn't have bathtubs – we made it in toilets."

"Ah, right. That's why you're always spewing shit."

000

Hawthorne vomits behind a rock one evening, and tries to hide the blood from Ellie, but she sees it and makes them go back to_ Groundbreaker_ right away to buy those reactive kinematics for his hibernation sickness.

"Oh. Hello, Miss Fenhill."

"Hey, Mfuru. Long time no see."

"Unfortunately."

"I get the feeling you're not as excited as I am for this little pow-wow."

"What gave it away?"

The doctor agrees to perform the surgery on Hawthorne, to install the kinematics. Ellie refuses. Conflict of interest, she says. But she simply couldn't live with herself if anything went wrong during the procedure.

Not that she'll ever tell anyone, mind you.

"The kinematics cost three months worth of fuel for the _Unreliable,"_ she says, sitting in the waiting room, reading the ship manifest to the rest of the crew. "Now, we can cut out our weekly purchases of Purpleberry Crunch – I know that'll be hard, Felix, but you'll survive – and we'll have to drink water tabs instead of Rizzo's drinks for a while. I've been talking to Lilya up in Sublight, and she's agreed to let us do that Scylla run. If that goes well, she'll give us the Goodsprings one."

"And then?" Max groans.

"And then… we'll still owe two months of fuel."

Ellie expects grumbles from the crew, expects them to bitch and moan and maybe even get up and walk away forever – but they don't.

"I have a few guns I could spare," Parvati pipes up. "I mean, I was savin' 'em to trade for some new engine parts, and they won't get big bits at the gun shop, but at least it's somethin'."

"I may have a few texts I could part with," the Vicar adds. "Some of them are quite rare and, with the right buyer, could give us a good boost in needed funds."

"Yeah, I guess me and the bucket of bolts here could pull our weight and see if we can catch some odd jobs around the ship."

"An _excellent _idea, Miss Nyoka Ramnarim-Wentworth III!"

"SAM, what did I _tell_ you about calling me that in public?"

"I have a Ceiren Fraser tossball card I could sell!" Felix chirps. "It's worth a _fortune!_ I was waiting until I had the Cameron Fraser card to make a set, but the Captain needs it more than I do."

Ellie is speechless. She cannot mask the expression of pure shock on her face, and the rest of the crew notices.

"Ellie? You okay?"

"You… you guys are willing to give up your things?" she gawks. "Why?"

"What do you mean _'why?'_"

"Yeah. The Captain's _our_ Captain, Miss Fenhill," Parvati says, as if it were a simple, known thing. "He's family. Family helps each other out. We'd do the same thing for you if you needed it."

Ellie doesn't answer. But she feels her cold, cold heart begin to warm a little, in the company of these misfits around her – the engineer, the Vicar, the hunter, the muscle, the robot – and her. All a little broken in their own way, but all mostly whole, together.

Huh.

Some family.

000

Ellie doesn't like being wrong. Means she slipped up, made some mistake. And mistakes are what get you killed.

But she's beginning to think that maybe what Hawthorne said in the control room is right.

Which means she's wrong.

Which means she's fucking pissed at herself.

Which means she hates Hawthorne a little more.

And likes him a_ lot_ more for it.

000

There's a traveller on the road between Cascadia and Stellar Bay who's lost, and asks for water tabs when they cross paths.

Parvati doesn't have any, and neither does the Captain. Ellie gives the traveller an entire blister pack of her own without even realising it.

"That was a real swell thing you did back there, Miss Fenhill," Parvati says. "Real swell."

Ellie-from-two-months-ago might have smacked the girl for that. Ellie-from-right-now rather likes the smile she gets from Alex.

000

Ellie hears retching from the washrooms again.

It's Hawthorne. Again.

"Hey, Cap?" she ventures, tapping on the door with a metallic click. The rest of the crew watches from the kitchen – or, pretends to ignore the exchange while raptly eavesdropping.

"What?"

"Can I come in?"

There's a pause. The kitchen holds its breath.

"Fine. Yeah, come on in."

The door slides open.

Hawthorne's a fucking mess.

He's pale and wilting and cradling the toilet seat like it's the only thing anchoring him to the world of the living. It smells like sweat and bile and cleaning product, and its more sombre than a graveyard.

She takes a seat on the tile beside him.

"You look like shit, Cap."

He chuckles weakly. "Ha. Don't feel much better."

"Mfuru mentioned possible side effects from your kinematics. I'm assuming you might have a few."

"No shit."

"Should pass in a day or so, I'm sure."

"You're sure?"

"No. The only guarantees in life are taxes and death."

"Well, I guarantee I'm dying, then."

"Nah, you'll live. Probably."

"Thanks, I –"

He heaves into the toilet again, the words torn from his mouth, and its nothing but clear bile. All the muscles in his body must be aching, his stomach must be yellow and sour.

She sits there with him in silence, a hand on his shoulder sympathetically. It's a little awkward, mostly because Ellie's not used to… comforting anyone, but Alex lets her, so she continues.

"Can I tell you something?" he breathes.

"Sure."

"Is it… is it strange, I guess, that I can sort of… pause time?"

Ellie blinks.

_"What?"_

"I can make time stop, almost. I don't know how, and I can't hardly control it. Comes in useful in a fight, I guess. The whole world just sort of… slows right down, turns kind of grey. Like an old film played back at half-speed. But me, I'm still moving normally. Or faster, I suppose. Depends on how you want to look at it. And when I do this… slowing-down thing, my head feels likes its fucking splitting open. And there's a shooting pain down my arm."

He pauses, flexing his arm, rotating his wrist – something he's always done, but Ellie had not noticed before now that it looks… _feebler_ than the other one. Withered, almost, like it's malnourished or something, like a good blow with a tossball stick might just shatter him to a million little pieces. No one might notice except a doctor. A good fucking doctor at that.

"It's getting worse, I think. The pain. It shoots farther, and stays longer. And my head aches like a motherfucker."

He pauses a moment.

"I think I'm dying."

Ellie frowns at this.

"You're not dying, Cap, so quit your theatrics."

She's had little experience with hibernation sickness, in all actuality, but she's read before about some… strange instances. The human body is not meant to be played with like that, to be paused and resumed like a fucking Aetherwave drama.

"It's… it's perfectly normal," she lies. "Your time distortion. It might simply be your mind experiencing space-time relapse approximation –"

"Dumb it down for all the folks who aren't doctors, please."

"Your brain is experiencing its own little skip, like a ship through space. Like your body is the ship, and your mind is travelling at or near the speed of light, and essentially time stands still."

"Ah. Right."

"How long were you in hibernation, Captain?"

He hesitates.

"Long enough."

Ellie huffs.

"Just – take it easy, Cap. Get some rest. Let your body get used to your kinematics. I'm sure you'll be ripping out mantisaur hearts by next week."

"Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Els."

"Don't mention it."

Ellie leaves.

She scours the Aetherwaves for articles, for medical journals, for peer-reviewed papers on hibernation side-effects, and she cannot find a single thing regarding mind skips.

She's not sure if that's a good thing or not.

000

"Nyoka, if I never smell another rapt, it'll be too soon."

"Aren't you a sawbones, Fenhill? Figured you ought to have smelled worse."

"Sure, but those things reek like bad after-shave. Like that awful perfume they spray in Byzantium public washrooms. It's different."

"Ha. I'm with you there. At least humans have the courtesy to wait a while before their bodies start to stink."

Ellie punches Felix playfully in the shoulder.

"Most of 'em."

000

Ellie can't sleep.

So she wanders into the kitchen in the middle of the night-cycle, intent on stealing some tileritos, maybe.

Hawthorne is there.

"Looking for something?"

"Shit, Cap, you scared the fuck outta me. Why are you being all creepy, wandering the halls at night?"

"Why are _you?"_

"Can't sleep, I guess."

"Yeah. Me neither. Tea?"

Ellie huffs, sitting down in the seat near him. "Yeah, 'cause _that'll_ help me fall asleep."

"Not supposed to. Supposed to keep you from falling asleep _tomorrow,_ during a fight with a pissed-off spacer."

"Right. Sure, thanks."

He gets up and makes her one, sliding it across the table.

Ellie smirks.

"Never figured you for the domestic kind, Cap. You'd make a good housewife some day, you know."

Hawthorne laughs. "You'd make a terrible husband too, just saying. Always out late, never thinking of the kids –"

"Hey, I made sure Felix and Parvati were in bed _before_ I watched my porn vids this time, okay? I'm a pretty good dad, I'll have you know."

He chuckles. "Right."

Ellie bites her lip, hesitant. But ventures further.

"What about you, Alex? What are your parents like?"

He pauses a moment, sipping his tea, then Ellie watches as a slow smile spreads across his face, a faraway look in his eyes.

"They're… great. The best. Always made sure I had what I needed. Never lacked for anything. Wasn't spoiled, mind you, but I didn't have a hard life. Mom, she was always fretting about one thing or another, could never get her to simmer down, to just enjoy herself without making sure we all were taken care of first. She had the kindest heart. And _dad,"_ Hawthorne laughs, "dad was so fucking funny. He could weasel a smile out of an asscrack. He was the only one who could make mom unwind, if only for a little while. They were perfect for each other."

Hawthorne's smile falters, and he swallows.

"Cap?"

"I guess they're gone now. Died years ago, I assume."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Nah, it's fine. These things happen. Taxes and death, like you said. People die. Can't expect anything different."

"I guess."

Ellie's not too sure what to say to him. She can't relate – not really.

Well, not _fully._

She reaches out and puts a hand over his, and he blinks at the sudden contact.

"You don't have to pretend, Alex."

"Pretend?"

"To be Captain all the time. Like these things don't bother you. You're allowed to be human once in a while."

He smiles a small smile.

"Thanks."

He's a good-looking man, really, his features sharp and his smile soft and his nose slightly crooked, like maybe its been broken once or twice, and his short hair is always unruly, like it can never be truly tamed. He's unknowable and untouchable, the dashing Captain Hawthorne, shrouded in mystery, always talking but never _speaking,_ always going but never _moving._ Never arriving, always in the process of leaving.

Sort of like herself, she reckons.

She does something stupid then, or maybe something great, she doesn't yet know.

She reaches out and traces his jawline, pulling him closer. But she doesn't kiss him this time – she comes close enough that their noses are touching, that their breath is intermingling in the space between.

"You're a good man, Alex Hawthorne," she breathes. "Or whoever you are. Just… needed you to know. That's all."

She could kiss him. Architect knows she wants to. And Ellie always does what she wants – unless, of course, it interferes with what's best for her. And not being vulnerable, not getting a knife between the ribs is _always _what's best. Staying alive is best.

Right?

She lets him go, and pulls away.

"Right," she says. "Now that all the mushy shit is out of the way, I'm gonna go punch a wall. See you tomorrow, Cap. And thanks for the tea."

"Goodnight, Els."

She leaves the ship and finds Booker in the bar again, and loses herself in him, and uses him to burn away the face of Caster, the face of her parents, the face of Hawthorne.

Mostly Hawthorne.

000

Ellie does something she hasn't done in – well, _ever,_ she supposes.

She asks for help.

Well, not exactly _help,_ but something close to… advice, perhaps.

She's living on a spaceship full of trash disasters, surrounded by idiots of the highest calibre, but she supposes the Vicar is probably the most sane of them all – notwithstanding the fact he spent time in prison, strangled a man to death in front of her, and frequently throws textbooks down the hall in some sort of French-induced rampage, flinging out swear words even Ellie has not heard.

She knocks on his door and enters.

He's fucking baked out of his mind.

"Welcome, Miss Fenhill. Please, take a seat."

He's poring over his texts again, hunched over the desk, eyes bloodshot and darting, and it smells like Primal ass in here.

"Vicky… where the _fuck _did you get Giggle Smoke?"

"Once again, Miss Fenhill, it's _Vicar,_ not _Vicky."_

"Fine, _Vicar._ Spill. That shit's worth three hundred bits a toke. Also outlawed everywhere but Monarch, and even here you can't hardly find a dealer."

The Vicar smiles lazily, leaning back in his chair. "I have my ways, Doctor."

"Fine, be all cryptic and shit. I'll find out sooner or later."

"Hm. You are good at that. _Snooping."_

"Isn't that against your religion? Or something?"

"Scientism isn't really a religion, Ellie. It's more of a line of thinking, a way of being."

"Sure. Whatever."

She takes a seat on his bed, swiping some papers and texts onto the floor without a care. "You know, that stuff's pretty bad for you. Coats your lungs in glycerin and ethylene, eventually suffocating you."

"I find it… relaxes me, yet focuses my attention at the same time. Particularly useful when I feel I'm coming close to a breakthrough in my research. But I could say much the same about your black tar cigarettes now, couldn't I?"

"Yeah, but my Stogies are made from tobaccorn – yours are from toxic genetically modified mushflowers on Scylla."

"Oh, so you're here to debate the health effects of a recreational puff of _scyllantis trojanis_ then? Or perhaps the moral debacle presented with genetically modified foodstuffs?"

Ellie bites her lip.

"No. I… wanted to ask you something."

Max's smile widens.

"Well. It must be important if you've come to grace your presence in my humble abode. Go on, then," he says, closing the book in front of him. "I'm all ears."

Ellie's not quite sure what to say to him, now that she's here.

The Vicar must see her dilemma plain as day. He plucks his tightly-wrapped mushflower toke from the ashtray on his desk, smoke still curling in the air.

"Sometimes there's things in life we simply cannot answer," he says, tapping that book he's been researching. "Not right away. So we need a little help along the path. And that's okay."

He hands her the toke.

She smokes it.

It dulls the thoughts plaguing her mind, for a little while. And for a little while, she forgets.

She tells Max all about her parents, about how hollow and cruel they were, like pretty, empty shells up on the shore. She talks about her youth, her university days, how the halls of the medical school bleed red with students clawing like savage animals to the top. She tells him how she hated it all, how she felt like a splinter in the flesh, how she simply knew she didn't belong. She even tells him about the _Silvercove,_ about Caster. About Booker.

And it… feels _good,_ just talking to someone about these things. Feels like maybe she needn't have held onto them for so long. And that maybe it's okay, you know, for someone else to help carry them too. A little. Maybe. Because it's not like he can use these things against her at some point.

But there _is,_ she realises. He _could._ And yet she understands, at the same moment, that she knows he won't. She knows. She trusts him.

It's a foreign thing. Heavy, but not uncomfortable.

"Max…" she hesitates, blowing out, the toke almost all spent now. "What do you do if there's… something you want, but you can't have it?"

"To what degree?"

"The highest."

"Ah, the ever-present challenge of self-denial – the willingness to forgo personal pleasures, or undergo personal trials, in the pursuit of the good."

"The… _good?"_

"Yes, of course. The improvement of one's self, or the advancement of society – or science – as a whole."

"The… good…"

Huh.

Ellie's _never _been good. She's never had any interest in improving herself, of progressing anything other than the girth of her wallet, the ammo in her back pocket, the thrill of the adventure.

"So… what you're saying is… I _should_ fuck him."

"I – what?"

"If denying yourself something you want is purely for the improvement of yourself or society, but you have no interest in either of those, then there's_ really_ no good reason why you shouldn't then, right?"

"I – I suppose –"

"And what about self-preservation?"

"Self-preservation? Well, one could assume that the notion is fruitless. The only way forward along the Path, the only way to grow, is to cast aside all reasonable doubts and advance headlong. Your Path is predetermined, after all. You end up exactly where you need to be."

She laughs. "Fuck, Vicky, this whole time I was being prudish as a goddamned nun, for fuck's sake. Self-denial sacrificial bullshit, pursuit of the good my _ass –"_

"Ellie, what in Creation are you _talking_ about?"

"It's so simple, really. Fuck, preacher, this is some powerful shit you've got," she chuckles, handing him back the toke. "Thanks, Max, really, this has been – _enlightening,_ for sure, but I think that's enough globetrotting for me tonight. I'm gonna go crash."

She leaves, but stops in his doorway.

"And… thanks. For, you know. Listening and stuff."

He smiles, still slightly confused, but conceding to the fact he might never know.

"The door is always open, my friend."

_My friend._

She cannot help but smile back.

000

"Organic obstacle is blocking this unit's intended path. Rerouting… unsuccessful. Preparing to remove the obstacle."

"I'll remove that cleaning attachment and shove it up your exhaust pipe, SAM."

"…rerouting successful…"

000

"Hey, Ellie. Ellie. _Ellie."_

_"What?"_

"When was it that you realised the Board was crushing the life outta this colony? In school? In Byzantium? Did you see some exec sacrifice a hundred virgins just so he could get his fancy marmalade?"

"Felix – what the fuck are you going on about?"

"The Board! The Machine of Oppression! Ain't that why you became a pirate? 'Cause you wanted to be free and all?"

"I'm just after a paycheck, kid."

"That ain't true. I'll get you to tell me one of these days."

"I have no problem sacrificing just one virgin to the Board if it gets him to fuck the fuck off."

"Ah, classic space pirate Ellie. I'm taking notes on this."

000

Ellie wonders why he hides himself, why he pretends to be Alex Hawthorne when he's not. She wants to know if it's because he's hiding something, or maybe running from someone, or if he's really desperate to be seen. Does he think this isn't real? That he's not a real person?

Ellie's seen the way he stares out into the nothingness of space, knows the look on his face – that he's looking for something out there. For what, she doesn't know. She's not sure _he _even knows. But she knows the feeling of being lost yet never truly belonging in the first place.

Maybe he prefers to be lost and wandering. Maybe it's easier.

000

Hawthorne does what he said he would do.

He puts Zora in charge of the Iconoclasts and prevents a slaughter.

And not only that, he convinces Sanjar to play nice with them.

There's a huge celebration in Stellar Bay that night, the city opening its gates to the Iconoclasts, the saltuna warehouse closing early, and The Yacht Club serving half-price liquor.

So, naturally, the crew are smashed beyond all sensible parameters.

Ellie is five drinks in when the edges of her vision start to blur. Parvati's gone missing, and so is Max, and Nyoka's trying to push another drink onto the cute girl up at the bar, while Felix goes and vomits in the corner.

Hawthorne sits across the booth from her, and he's smiling. She rather likes his smile. Makes him look more handsome. Better than that stupid scowl he wears.

"I rather like your smile, Cap. Makes you look more handsome. Better than that stupid scowl you wear."

He chuckles. "Well, thanks. I guess. Though I figured you for someone who gets off on scowls. You've got a prize-winning frown, you know."

She punches him. Only in the shoulder, don't worry.

"Looks like Nyoka's gonna have some company tonight," Ellie smirks, glancing over at the hunter, the girl standing very close to her, hand resting lightly on her hip.

"Yeah. Guess so." He sighs, almost wistfully. "Seems like only yesterday we were in this same bar and hired her on – after, you know, we slapped the hangover out of her."

"I don't think you can _ever _slap the hangover out of that woman."

"Yeah, I think you're right."

Hawthorne takes a long swig of his Zero Gee.

"I was thinking of asking her to stay on a while longer. Giver her her own room on the ship, make her a real part of the crew. What do you think?"

"I think she's already one of us, Cap."

He raises an eyebrow. "One of _us?"_

Ellie rolls her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I know. You're all a bunch of bad fucking influences. You're stuck with me now."

"Good," he smirks. "Good." His grin turns playful. "But what about you? Anyone catch your eye in here?"

"Hey Cap, this isn't exactly workplace-appropriate conversation. But seeing as this isn't exactly the workplace, I'll indulge you." She pauses, taking a swig of her Iceberg whiskey. "No."

"Oh. Thought Booker might be here or something."

That gives her pause.

Booker. He knows about Booker.

He gave enough of a shit to_ ask _about Booker.

She swirls her Iceberg around, the ice clattering against the sweating glass.

"No. He's gone. Left about a week ago now. Don't know where, he didn't tell me."

"Oh."

"Surprised Catherine's not here. This seems right up her alley."

"Look, it's not like that –"

"Then what's it like?"

"She – that was a… business deal. Look, I don't have to explain anything to you."

"Hey, you started this."

He looks about ready to defend himself, but thinks twice.

"Yeah," he deflates a little. "Yeah, I guess I did. Sorry."

There's an obstinate silence, a refined bitterness hanging in the air, and Ellie washes it away with another long swig of Iceberg.

"I heard he asked you to go with him. I heard you told him no."

Ellie winces at the memory but covers it with the whiskey burn.

"Alright, who spilled?"

"No one."

"Nyoka? Wasn't it?"

"Felix, actually. Didn't take much."

"Figured. Kid's as squishy as a sprat."

"So did you? Almost leave?"

Ellie shrugs. "Might've. What's it matter, I'm here now, ain't I?"

"Why'd you stay?"

"Architect, what is this, twenty questions or something? I'm not a fucking encyclopedia."

He doesn't say anything. He lets her answer in her own time.

"Already got a crew, I guess."

"You hate the crew."

"No I don't. Who said that?"

"You. Literally all the time."

"Yeah, well, I don't mean it. Guess I'm just not used to, you know… feelings and shit. My parents sucked. Never grew up knowing what it was like to have someone – I don't know – _care _about you. And I sure as fuck didn't care about anyone back then."

"And now?"

"Fuck, what do you want me to _say,_ Hawthorne? That I had everything – _everything_ as a kid, but it wasn't good enough? I was too selfish, I had to fill the hole of my parents not giving a shit with all the money they could throw at me? That I had the best education in Halcyon but I don't know a damn thing about being _human? _Because I fucking know, alright?"

It wasn't an apology – not really. It wasn't an admittance, either. It was more of an… acceptance. Ellie's not sure she's ever done that before. Simply accepted: who she had been, what she'd done, who she was now. What she might do tomorrow.

"Well," he says. "That was… constructive."

She lets out an airy laugh. "No fucking shit. Look, Hawthorne – and I know you're not _really _Hawthorne – I don't know what you're up to and I don't know why you're talking with Welles – I don't know where you came from and I have no fucking clue where you're going, but I'll be there on your ship and not Booker's because A: you're paying me way more than he ever could, and B: you're not as annoying as he is. Not by fucking much though."

Ellie works her jaw and runs a hand through her hair. "Shit, I haven't talked this much since my thesis defense. Shut up now, and let's get fucked."

"Fine by me."

So they do.

She's eleven or twelve drinks in now, and the world is going sort of hazy, and Nyoka left with that girl, and Max reappears only to disappear again after stealing a lighter but no smokes, and Felix might actually be dead over in the corner.

They talk about Roseway. They talk about Edgewater. They talk about Nyoka and Parvati and ADA and the Asscrack Expander. They talk about mantisaurs and Sanjar and rifle specs and the nastiest thing Ellie's ever had to patch up and they talk about everything but Hawthorne.

And she can see it in his eyes again, just like back at the prefab – that subtle slide into _more,_ the longer they talk, that deeper gaze he's giving her, the way he's leaning in closer, and he can't hide it. He can hide his name and his story and everything about himself but he can't hide this.

He wants her.

Ellie would be lying if she said she didn't wonder if she's been burrowing into his mind, too, if she's been plaguing his thoughts and dreams. She's curious if he pictures her while he's fucking Catherine Malin – if her hair is too short, her skin too light, her voice just off pitch for him.

She wants to know if he turned down a life with her so he didn't ever lose a chance with his _someone else._

Ellie downs the rest of her whiskey and gets up to get another.

"Want anything?" she asks, brushing his hand with her fingertips, lingering there a little longer than necessary.

He falters, and she rather enjoys this dumbstruck Alex, this Alex who doesn't know what to say.

"Uh… sure."

"Whiskey?"

"Please."

She leaves and comes back, sliding in the seat beside him.

"Here."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. You know, seems like only yesterday we were in this same bar and Felix thought you were bent."

"Right," he squeaks, then clears his throat. "Right. I think you proved him wrong, didn't you?"

"Yeah, I think I did."

"Well,_ I_ recall –"

Already tiring of all the talk, and never one for words, unlike the Captain, Ellie leans in and slides a hand across Hawthorne's thigh, making his breath hitch a little, and she smiles dangerously.

"Look, Alex – we both have problems that banging isn't going to fix, but it's not gonna make it worse, either." Her hand wanders higher and she's whispering in his ear, now. "So here's what I'm thinking: we go back to the ship, fool around a little, and then you can finish the rest of your sentence, alright?"

"But, Ellie, I thought –"

"I know what I said, Cap. I'm a woman. I'm allowed to change my mind."

She downs the rest of her whisky in one gulp, then steals his from between his fingers and downs it, too.

She gets up and leaves, then, leaves the bar and the thronging crowd behind her, totters out into the cool, starry, sulfurous night. She doesn't look behind her to see if Hawthorne is there, to make sure he's following behind.

She's not entirely sure she's thought this through, either. But most of her decisions are like that, she supposes.

It's like what Booker once said to her – everything is disorganized, and random, and everyone is just dust in the wind, floating around without a purpose, without an end or a beginning. And if that's the case, whatever she does won't truly matter in the end. Not to the Path, not to the Grand Scheme of All Things, not to the Architect. Only to her.

And maybe that's enough.

There aren't any guards at the landing pad, and hardly no one in the streets, and ADA opens the Unreliable's hatch for her.

"Welcome aboard, Doctor Fenhill," she says.

And then, only a moment later:

"Welcome aboard, Captain."

She smiles.

Hawthorne growls and swings her around, pinning her against the locker bay walls. His hands are needy and his mouth is roaming over her lips, her neck, her jaw, his body pressed against hers, flush with hers, barely an inch of him _not_ touching her. He tastes like Iceberg and smokes, smells like leather and sweat, and his movements are slow, dulled by drink, yet sharpened by need, by knowing what to do. It's an intoxicating blend and she sucks it all in. Ellie runs her fingers through his unruly hair and gasps when he thrusts against her, wild and destitute, and she can already feel him through his jeans, hard against her pelvis.

"Fuck, Els," he rumbles – and there it is again, there's his nickname for her, the one he keeps only for her – "you don't know how long I – _fuck."_

"I'm about to find out, I reckon."

He laughs, an airy, breathy thing, his hands roaming across her skin, cool and burning all at once.

She slips a hand between their bodies and fumbles with his belt, palms him through his jeans, and he growls like a feral animal. In turn, he paws at her breasts, his thumb brushing against them, and she growls back. There's a wild look in his eye, and probably in hers, too, and for a fleeting moment she thinks she might perhaps be seeing a glimpse into the Before-Hawthorne, the man he used to be.

They make their way up the stairs to his room, hands and mouth roaming sloppy and drunk, and ADA slides that door open for them without a word.

It's big in here, and tidy and _lonely,_ almost, and Ellie realises then that she's never actually been in his room before.

She undresses hastily, tossing her boots and slacks aside, throwing her leather jacket across the desk, her shoulder patch just barely visible in the dark: _harder than Chaw and colder than space._

She smirks at that.

He's already undressed before her, broad-chested and skin riddled with scars both new and old, and he's – definitely ready.

In a rare moment of contemplation, he reaches out and brushes his fingers against her stomach softly. "Jesus, Els, you're – _beautiful,"_ he breathes, hands roaming lower, making her throw her head back and moan shamelessly. "Are you sure you want –?"

_"Shut up,"_ she hisses, swallowing his words with an impoverished kiss. "Just, for _once_ in your fucking life – shut up."

He smirks. "Yes, ma'am."

He takes her, and she takes him, violently and softly all at once, and she knows the other crewmembers can hear behind the thin prefab walls but she doesn't care. She fucking _relishes _the sounds she can coax from him, and she unabashedly shows him hers, too. It's sloppy and sluggish and loud and needy, and everything she needs right now.

Everything she wants right now.

And it doesn't feel wrong, so it _can't_ be.

And, true to his word, he doesn't say a thing until they're done, until he's spent and collapses beside her on his too-small bed, tangled in sheets and covered in sex and sweat.

"Fuck. Fuck," he pants. "Fuck. Did we just fuck?"

"You're fucking right we fucked, Cap."

"Fuck. Was that a mistake?"

"Fuck. Probably."

"Fuck."

She gets up to leave.

"Hey – where you going?"

"Back to my room," she says, grabbing his towel and cleaning herself off.

"Oh."

"Look – that was fun, Alex, and fuck, I needed that – but this doesn't have to mean anything."

"Right."

She shrugs into her clothing and pauses in the doorway. "Just – let me know if you want this to be a one-time thing. Or not. Preferably not."

He smiles, hair ruffled and skin glistening in sweat and half-naked under the sheets, and her heart leaps in her throat: she's not sure if he's ever looked quite so handsome as he does right now.

_"Definitely_ not," he says.

Ellie grins.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Hey again! Spoilers and sexytimes abound! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

They leave Monarch behind.

The _Unreliable_ blasts sulphurous dirt and golden sand beneath its hulking carapace as it sluggishly ascends to the skies, yet that doesn't stop the vivid throng of Iconoclasts, of Stellar Bay citizens from sending them on their way. They wave and clap and cheer, and there's drinks and singing and tears, and for once Ellie thinks this might be how a hero feels.

Nyoka is clinging to the safety bars of the cargo hold, watching her world and everything she ever knew fade away behind her, sun and sand and wind whipping through her hair, to catch one final glimpse before the cargo hatch slams shut.

Ellie stands beside her.

"It's – it's –" the hunter stammers over the thrum of the engine.

"A putrid cesspool? Hot and sticky? Too high up to be dangling out the ass-end of the ship?"

"My _home,"_ she finally manages. "It'll always be my home."

Ellie wonders how such a stagnant, smelly, xanthous world could possibly be missed, yet alone called _home_ by anyone – and yet she supposes that the hunter at least _has_ a home, which is more than she can say for herself.

Something bubbles to mind. _"Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending."_

Nyoka gives her a look.

"Who said that?"

"Well, I just did. But more specifically, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did."

"That supposed to make me feel better?"

"No. It's not a happy poem. But there's a bit of truth to it, I guess."

"What, that the end is better than the beginning? That leaving a place behind is easy?"

Ellie puts a hand on Nyoka's shoulder and squeezes softly.

"No. Just that better things are out there. And you won't find them till you let go."

The hunter says nothing. Her eyes are as wild and untamed as the crawling wilderness beneath them, a dangerous beauty to it all. A little pearl of the place she'll always belong to.

It's about Monarch. It's about her Charon family. It's about the booze and the sulphur and the days that blend into nights that blend into days.

Because of course it is.

And Ellie wonders, as they climb higher and higher into the heavens, the curve of Monarch bending the further they go – what is that feeling, that hollow ache inside your breast, when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?

She has never felt it before.

But she thinks it might be the too-huge universe vaulting us, and maybe it's a sort of goodbye.

The Unreliable's cargo hatch hisses and booms to a close with an unquestionable finality.

And it sounds like:

_gone._

000

There's something to be said for discretion.

But then again, where's the fun in that?

"And you just – what, knock on his door whenever you feel like it and get to boffing?"

"Get to – _what?"_

"Boffing, you know – bumping uglies, beating cheeks, the big boom-boom."

"Felix, I don't know what kind of serials you've been listening to, but you need to listen to them less and get laid a little more."

"Pshh, you know what I mean. Getting laid, then, if you prefer."

"I'd prefer it if I never heard you say _beating cheeks_ again."

"Ha!" Nyoka barks, munching on a Purpleberry Chew, muddy boots on the kitchen table. "Beating cheeks."

"Not from _you,_ either."

"No strings?" Felix probes.

"No strings."

"Whenever you want?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

He lets out a long, low whistle. "Well, bend me over and slap my ass cheeks," he grins. "You did it. Lucky bastard."

"Look, Millstone – I don't know if you're trying to be cute or conceal the fact you actually have no input when it comes to talking about bedroom shit, but come on, man, you need to stop it with the horrible similes. And _enough_ with the cheeks."

"I have input," he says defensively. "A decent amount of input, you know. I'm not a virgin, Doc, if that's what you're thinking."

"Right. And next you're going to tell us you invented the skip drive," Nyoka smirks.

"Oh har har, you guys are so hilarious."

"Should've been a comedian instead of a hunter."

"You probably had to pay someone, didn't you, Millstone?"

"No! People use to pay _me,_ I'll have you know."

Ellie blinks.

Oh.

_Oh._

"Shit, Felix, I didn't know –"

He waves her off. "S'fine, Doc. Did what I had to, you know? Paid for food and a place to stay, most nights."

"Yeah, but you shouldn't have to – _you know."_

"Sell myself? Shit, Doc, I wasn't no red-light strumpet. Just here and there, you know."

Ellie frowns, and a strange sort of… anger wells up from inside.

"I hope no one took advantage of you," she seethes, mentally visualising painting _Groundbreaker's _floor the colour of some skag's brain matter.

Felix huffs a laugh. "Hell, you worried about me? I managed just fine, Ellie, don't worry."

"Yeah, didn't the kid beat the shit out of another dock worker just for badmouthing his tossball team?" Nyoka adds.

"Exactly. See Doc? I'm a live wire. Ain't nobody taking advantage of me."

Ellie frowns. "I still don't like it. If I'd have known…"

What? What would she have done? She didn't know Felix then – and would she have cared anyways?

Probably not.

That hurts a little bit.

"You'd have kicked their ass, Doc, I know it."

Felix smiles, and Ellie wants to believe in herself as much as Felix seems to.

"See? Kid's fine, Fenhill. And I'm glad for you, girl," Nyoka muses, thankfully changing the subject. "It gets lonely on your own. Nice to have a fuck-buddy sometimes. Nicer when they're on the same ship."

Felix's eyes dart from the hunter to the floor, then back to the hunter again, then onto the ceiling.

She smirks. "Don't worry, kid, I don't play like that. Who's your tossball team?"

Felix perks up at the mention of the sport again. "Rizzo's Rangers, of course."

"Mine too."

It takes Felix less time than Ellie thought for the dawning to cut across his face.

Parvati skips into the kitchen, buzzing like a drunken mantiswarm.

"Watcha talkin' 'bout?"

"Just tossball. And how Fenhill's boning the Captain."

Parvati makes a noise somewhere between a leaking air mattress and a pneumatic press.

"Oh, you are _not."_

"She is _too."_

"_No way!"_

"Yes way!"

"Guys, I'm _right here._ Can you stop talking about me like this is the newest episode of _The Space Adventures of Singularity Steel?"_

"Oh, this is _way_ better than what Singularity Steel is up to."

Ellie rolls her eyes.

And she tries hard not to let a small smile slip through.

Max comes in a while later, and Ellie has to hear the story all over again, and the Vicar gives her a look that says he might just understand their little mushflower toke pow-wow in his room the other night. Someone pulls out a bottle of whiskey (probably Nyoka) and they laugh and swear and drink deep into the night cycle, and Felix ends up face-first on the floor after losing an arm-wrestling match (definitely Nyoka), and Parvati makes them all piss their pants after she swears lewdly and claps a hand over her mouth too late, and then Hawthorne comes in, and no one mentions anything, and it becomes a sort of game, tossing innuendos and dirty looks around the room like some sort of half-washed tossball game, and Ellie begins to think she might be falling in love with them all.

Fuck.

000

_Alex,_

_Meet me in the control room ASAP. It's urgent. Serious lighting malfunction, Parvati says._

_Ellie_

The doctor smirks when Hawthorne comes crashing down the stairs and flying into the control room, hair all ruffled, eyes wild, shirt stained with something – water, maybe? Rizzo's?

"What – what's going on?" he wheezes, chest heaving. "Where's Parvati? Where's the problem? Is there a fire?"

Ellie's grin turns coy and she puts up her hands in defeat. "You caught me."

"What –?"

"ADA, close the door."

"Yes, Miss Fenhill."

"Ellie –"

"Sorry, Cap," she trills, setting her hands on his hips. "This was the only way to pry you from that damn datapad your nose is always stuck in."

"Wait – so there's no malfunction? The light's fine?"

"Architect, you're thick sometimes," she hums, kissing the space between his jaw and neck. She feels him shiver beneath her lips.

"Are you shitting me?" he breathes. "I dropped half a glass of Nanner Spank on my tee shirt running down here."

"Mm."

"You have any idea how hard it is to find a _Terror on Monarch_ shirt with Halcyon Helen on the front?"

Ellie pulls him closer, lips fluttering across his throat. "I wanted an excuse to see you, Alex," she says, and then, to prove her point, she grinds her hips up into his, eliciting a throaty groan from the man.

"Well," he grunts, apparently over the tragedy of his spilled juice drink. "Now that I'm here… what exactly did you want to see?"

Ellie laughs.

"Someday, being a smartass will get you into trouble."

"Nah, I've got a good woman watching my back."

"Woah there, cowboy. I'm only here because you're paying me to be your medic, remember?"

"Hm, right," he muses, thumb brushing across her cheek. "There's nothing else keeping you aboard?"

"Well, maybe a few things," she purrs, smiling wickedly as she dips her hand below the elastic of his sweatpants.

He groans, arching into her touch. _"Fuck."_

"You're kinda sexy when you're all flustered, you know that Cap?"

"Kinda sexy?" he chuckles. "I think I'm downright _gorgeous."_

"Watch yourself. Your head gets any bigger and you might have trouble holding it up."

"Ellie, I don't have trouble keeping _anything_ up, let me tell you."

Ellie squeezes him a little harder, wheedling another heady moan.

"You smug son of a bitch."

"Hey, watch it. I don't tolerate insubordination. ADA, do I tolerate insubordination?"

"Insubordination aboard this Yakita 120 A2 Apex transport starship, and any other class C cargo ship is, according to Halcyon Interstellar Law, against the –"

"ADA, turn off your damn logs, will you?" Ellie huffs.

"I am sorry Doctor Fenhill, only the Captain of this ship may authorize me to do so."

Hawthorne hesitates until Ellie's frown turns downright severe, then, with a chuckle, says, "ADA, log off for a while."

"Of course, Captain."

Her screen flickers and turns dark.

000

Hawthorne doesn't eat his food sometimes.

No one says anything.

Hawthorne forgets where he sets his datapad down ten minutes beforehand.

No one says anything.

Hawthorne can't read in the mornings, his headaches are so bad.

No one says anything.

Hawthorne's ring won't stay on his finger, he's lost so much weight.

No one says anything.

000

"Hey, Max."

"What?"

"You really think we all have a purpose? That everything happens for a reason?"

"It's not really that simple, but yes, fine. Anything else?"

"If that's the case… is it my purpose to annoy you, or your purpose to be annoyed by me?"

"Go away."

"You can't deny fate, Vicky."

000

_Groundbreaker_ is a place of dampened technicolour, a kaleidoscope of different lives. Muffled dreams and hammered steel far as the eye can see. It's a place of thievery, smuggling, murder, and yet it is truthful in its intentions. It will not stab anyone in the back, for they know the latent danger slinking through the recycled air all along.

Ellie feels more at home here than perhaps anywhere else in Halcyon.

And it's the last place someone like Felix should have grown up.

They have exactly four hours on the _Groundbreaker_ while the _Unreliable_ refuels and Ellie can hardly believe the kid managed to drag her here – and yet here she is, face right up his ass, following him up a ladder behind the engineering port in the Back Bays. She could be drinking away the afternoon with Nyoka in the Lost Hope right now.

Minor lapse in judgement, to be sure.

They reach the top and Felix laughs, a wild, jovial thing, and says "look, Ellie – isn't it _beautiful?"_

The neon city is dazzling from this high, and the air circulators are much closer up here, and there's a strong breeze that threatens to fling them right off if they wander too close to the edge. Felix takes no heed, and laughs, arms wide, as if embracing all of the tinted prisms and fractals of the ship, of the danger of it all.

"It's… definitely different from this angle. Why'd you bring me up here?"

Felix turns to her, and reaches into his pocket.

"Max told me something last night. He said not to let the past define me. To take it and tear it up and cast it away in the wind, or something like that. And I thought… now don't laugh at me, Doc. I thought… I don't know, I figured _you _out of everyone might understand something like that."

He pulls a copy of _The Masked Marketeer_ from his pocket, the comic crumpled and rolled into a tube, and smiles a little.

"This was my favourite comic as a kid. I read it all the time, over and over. I found it in the gutter and kept it ever since. It's not my favourite serial anymore, but I always kept it. I don't know why. It's not like it meant much to me, anyways. I haven't read it in probably ten years. But I just… couldn't let it go."

Felix wrings the comic in his hands, gazing down across the people crawling through the streets below.

"I don't know. Maybe it's stupid."

He hesitates a moment more before something changes in his eyes. He tears a page from the comic and flings it out over the city. The waxy paper flutters, catches the breeze, and floats all the way down, landing over by the med bay.

He does it again. And again.

Ellie watches him.

"Felix?"

"Yeah?"

"You alright?"

"Yeah. No. I don't know. It's… it's kinda like a maze, Doc. You spend your whole life stuck in the maze, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it'll be, and just imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You sit there forever, and you never get out."

"Your past is always your past, kid. Even if you run away, even if you forget it, it always remembers you."

"But only if I let it."

He crushes a page with ire and tosses it away.

"I don't know about you, but I'm damn lucky the Captain came along when he did."

Ellie knows the kid's too starry-eyed, too bright and idealistic. She knows the world's going to stomp on him good one day and snuff out his spark. But today, here, is not _some day,_ and she sees a flicker of truth in his words.

She takes a page of his comic, crumples it in her fist, and lets it go.

000

"ADA, where's the Captain from?"

"That information is classified."

"Alright. When did he become the Captain?

"That information is classified."

"Fuck. So, tell me this then: how long –"

"That information is classified."

"Where's your power button, I'm restarting you."

"That information is classified."

000

"You ever think about what you'd be doin' if you weren't aboard the ship?" Parvati asks, barely audible beneath the thrumming engine she's sprawled under at the moment.

Ellie sucks back a long drag of her Stogie Slim, shrugging, even though she knows the engineer can't see.

"Sometimes, I guess. Probably be on some other freighter by now, with better pay and less annoying crewmates."

"Aw, now don't go sayin' somethin' like that, Miss Ellie. I know you'd miss us all."

Ellie rolls her eyes, and the engineer still can't see.

"We have a great job, Doc. The best job."

"Right. We get to visit exotic places, meet new people. Then kill them."

"Oh, you're such a ham. You help more people than you hurt, that's your job."

"Not too sure about that."

"You are sorta right, though. The best thing about travellin' with the Captain is all the people we meet."

"Sure, and the _absolute_ best part is when they pay us."

"We never really had new folks in Edgewater, 'cept the Captain. Kinda hard to make new friends when everyone's already decided they don't like you."

"Could be a favour in disguise. Lotta people out here ain't that nice."

"You sure have seen a lot of the colony, huh, Dr. Fenhill?"

"_Ellie._ And sure, but most of it looks the same from inside a ship."

"Oh. Well, still, don't you find it thrilling? Bein' in space and all?"

"I don't know. It can get a little crowded at times. I like my space."

"But you're so – so – _free._ You can go anywhere in the system, anywhere at all!"

"Birds can fly anywhere they want and yet they don't."

"I guess. But birds born in cages think flyin' is an illness."

Ellie frowns.

000

Hawthorne falls coming down the ladder one night and breaks his wrist.

"Boss, you okay?"

"Oh my gosh, what happened, Cap? Did I spill oil on the floor again?"

"You were drunk. Tell me you were drunk."

"Yes, it's highly unlikely a sober Hawthorne would have made such a grievous mistake."

"Just – give us some space, guys, alright? Let me fix him up."

The crew disperses grudgingly but Felix hangs over the railing above, pretending he's not there for some time.

Hawthorne is mad at himself.

"I _fucking _– I shouldn't have done that. Now I'm fucked. How am I supposed to shoot a gun like this?"

"It looks like a hairline fracture, Cap. It's not as bad as it could have been. I'll give you a couple shots of adreno and do what I can for a cast – we've only got what SAM managed to find, so it'll have to do – but you'll be fine. Maybe take it easy for a week or so."

"Take it easy?" he snaps, making Ellie blink. "I've already been _taking it easy_ because of this whole kinetics thing –"

"Kinematics."

"Whatever. I can't afford to be on fucking vacation any longer."

Hawthorne winces, rubbing at his temple.

"Fucking headache."

"Captain."

"What?"

"Why did you fall?"

His frown turns severe.

"I slipped. That's all."

"You're lying."

"Fuck off."

"Hey, _don't _speak to me like that," she barks, making him wince again. "I'm you're fucking doctor and you need to stop lying to me. Why'd you fall?"

He pinches the bridge of his nose, cradling his arm.

"Jesus, Els. I… don't know. I just sort of – forgot where I was, what I was doing. I just let go of the ladder."

"You just – let go."

"That's what I _said,_ didn't I?"

If it was anyone else, Ellie would've smacked them for their insolence. As it was, she couldn't hit her Captain now, could she?

"It's just your hibernation sickness. Or a side effect of your kinematics."

"Bullshit."

"Then what do _you_ think it is, Doctor Hawthorne?"

He doesn't answer her.

"I'm such a dumbass."

"Well, I'm not going to argue with you."

"I can't even do my fucking job."

Ellie purses her lips. "No one's thinking that."

"Yeah they are. All the puking, and the headaches, and the spasms – I can't even shoot a gun. And now this."

"Pull your head out of your ass, Cap, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You're the best goddamned captain any of us has ever had, and nothing you say is gonna change that."

He's still angry at himself. He will be for a long time, she thinks.

"Els, can you go get me the pills in my room?"

She doesn't want to, but she does.

"You need to eat more," she tells him, handing down a bottle, the one with the label ripped off. He swallows a small handful dry. "You need to eat all your food and drink more water, and you should probably eat something now. Those pills are going to burn your stomach."

"Yeah, yeah, I will," he says, waving her off.

He doesn't. She hears him retching into the toilet again that night.

000

"I… I feel – _lost."_

Ellie agrees with the Vicar. Her head is still swimming, her nostrils still stinging from whatever the fuck she'd huffed in the hermit's back room.

"Yeah, I feel you, Vicky."

"No, I mean – _lost. _Adrift. Like my soul is – is simply unmoored, homeless, wandering around in space, like I – I have no purpose."

Ellie eyes Hawthorne warily. He eyes her back.

"Look, preacher, I'm not sure I can handle any more meta-existential bullshit today."

"Let's get back to the ship first, Max, and we can talk about this later."

"I mean – my whole life, I thought I was right where I was meant to be," he laughs bitterly, ignoring his crewmates, to their chagrin. "That's what I believed. I was made for greater things, for following the Plan and decoding all its intricacies. Once I deduced the properties of every particle in the universe and its trajectory – everything would become clear. The future, the past, each person's place within the Plan, all was supposed to be laid out. I was supposed to remove struggle, and bring peace, and – and –"

Max stops where he is, kicking up grey dust into Scylla's atmosphere.

"And I failed. It's all been for nothing. I have no purpose."

"Max –"

"It's just – spiritual euthanasia, isn't it, Captain? It's not enlightenment, it's just cowardice dressed in the trappings of wisdom! Controlling nothing – for we _can't _– is only a place to hide from responsibility that comes from everything you do. You're not truly alive, you're only living a kind of philosophical undeath. So – what's the _point?"_

Ellie pauses. She's heard those words before.

"Hey, DeSoto, don't you _dare_ say that. Those are dangerous words."

"Why does it matter? Everything is for naught, it's out of my control, it's –"

"Max," Hawthorne warns, touching the man's arm gingerly. "Get a hold of yourself."

"Ha! Get a hold of myself? Control my temper? I can't, that's the _point!"_ he bites, yanking away from the Captain. "Don't you see? We continually lie to ourselves, weaving stories in a vain attempt to convince us that we're in control – of _anything! _These stories are how we make sense of our lives, but they're nothing but stories. Fucking foolish, childish stories! We're desperately trying to find a story to organise reality in our heads, a story to control everything!"

"Max –"

"What's _your _story, Captain?" Max howls, grabbing the man by the cuff of his bodysuit with one hand, the pool of his throat with the other. "What shallow dreams do you perpetrate into the world? What's your story? What's your fucking _lie?"_

"_Max!"_ Ellie screams, grabbing at the Vicar – but too late. He's stronger and faster than her, and he flings her aside like a rag doll. She lands hard on her ass in the dust.

Something in him snaps, like she's seen before, like behind the walls of Fallbrook – the flicker of a dangerous man. His eyes – they aren't his, aren't _Max's._ It terrifies her.

"I've spent so many fucking years looking for the answers, but always in the wrong place, never where I was supposed to be. I wanted my parents to be proud, wanted to find all the answers, wanted to leave that fucking shithole of a colony I was doomed to die in anyway far, far behind me – and for _what?"_

"Max –"

"So I could discover that it's all nothing but a lie? That the basis of everything is fucking chaos, _not _order?"

"_Max,_ I can't –"

"Why couldn't I see it? Nothing is _planned!_ You can't control a fucking _thing!_ What did that spectre say? _You need to live in the chaos, and be fine in the chaos_ – but that doesn't fucking _work! Order_ makes people happy! Order makes _sense!_ Chaos doesn't! Entropy doesn't! Disorder –"

"… can't _breathe,_ Max, you're choking me!"

Max seems to pause a moment, and Ellie watches as the fire bleeds from his eyes, snuffed out like a flame to ice. Hawthorne is choking, Hawthorne is dying – _Max is killing him._

The Vicar drops his hands like he's been burned, and the Captain crumples to the earth in a grey dust, in a wheezing, throat-bruised heap.

"I – I didn't – I mean I – I'm _sorry,"_ Max keens, eyes wide in white horror at all he's done before him. "Alex – Captain, I –"

"_Back off,_ preacher," Ellie hisses, already between the men, Virginia's barrel pressed tight to Max's chest.

"Miss Fenhill –"

"_I mean it,"_ she growls, poking her gun harder into his flesh. "What the _fuck _do you think you're doing? You almost _killed_ him! You know the Cap's not –"

Well. Doing fine. As fit as he once was. Max knows this. Hawthorne doesn't need to.

"I'm fine, Els, really," the Captain says, struggling to his feet. Ellie helps him. Max doesn't dare move.

Hawthorne looks paler than ever, and he's got a red and purpling mark on his neck in the shape of Max's fingers, and it will bruise later, Ellie knows, because she's seen the same thing on the throats of university girls with terrible fathers and even worse boyfriends.

And, like those wretched excuses of intellectual women, she knows Hawthorne will forgive Max, and she knows, like those girls, that he thinks, somewhere along the line, this is _his fault._

Ellie regrets not saying something to those girls back then. But she knows they wouldn't have done a damn thing if she did.

"Captain, I – I don't know what to say – I am deeply, _deeply _sorry, I didn't mean –"

"It's alright," Alex says, still catching his breath. "It's fine, Max."

"How can you _say _that, Captain? It most certainly is _not_ fine! Ellie's right, I – I just about _murdered_ you! I had no control, I didn't even know what I was doing – how can you trust me, _ever again?"_

"Because I know that's not you," Hawthorne says, voice raw and crushed.

"But it _is_ me, it _was_ me, I almost –"

"That _was_ you. That you in there, in the hermit's cabin, that – that _ghost_ of you – that was you, or how you thought you were. That was you in your story, Max, in your quest for the truth. You forgot yourself in your story, like you said. But you need to drop your story – it's no more real than a horoscope."

Max blinks – for once, he has nothing to say.

"But… what do I _do? _My life's purpose, my goals, my quest – it's gone. I have nothing to live for. My story is done."

"You make your own. That's the point. There's nothing holding you back but you. And if you need to create a story – as we all do, to make sense of this fucked-up thing we call life – you might as well make it a damn good one."

Hawthorne picks up his rifle from the dust and turns around, walking back to the _Unreliable._

Max hovers. He's equal parts lost, ashamed, terrified. But also, maybe, a little bit found.

He can go. But he doesn't. For the first time in his life, Max has a choice, and he makes it. Ellie's not too happy, but it's not her call.

He stays with them, right until the end.

000

"Entropy is the natural state of the universe, Captain. All systems inevitably dissolve. And when that day comes to Halcyon, we will be ready."

It's the last thing Clyde Harlow ever says, the last thread binding Felix to his past.

They kill him.

_Felix_ kills him.

Felix is never quite the same again.

He crumples up the last page of his comic and throws it to the wind.

000

Hawthorne sings when he's in the shower.

Okay, maybe he doesn't _sing,_ but he hums little tunes sometimes, tunes that Ellie doesn't recognise.

She slips inside the washroom when no one is looking –

Hot _damn._

"_Fuck,_ Ellie," he coughs, choking on the water. "The fuck are you doing in here?"

"Nothing. Just wanted to check on you, make sure you weren't drowning or anything."

"Jesus, you scared the shit outta me."

"Oops."

"Did you need something? Or are you just going to stare at my junk?"

"Yeah, actually I do."

She starts undressing and Hawthorne frowns.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting in the shower, what's it look like?"

"_I'm_ in the shower."

"No shit."

Dawning cuts across his face. It's fucking hilarious.

"Els," he says as she's stepping in with him. "People are going to hear. These walls are thin, you know."

"Who cares?"

"I do. Don't want to scar Parvati for life."

"Don't be going all soft on me now, Cap."

Her tone is edging on hedonic and Ellie shifts her weight, reaching down and taking Hawthorne in her hand. He moans, pressing into her touch, hanging onto her shoulder like she's mooring him to the world.

"Don't worry," he breathes, deep and low in the doctor's ear, "there's no danger of that."

He pushes her against the tile wall and lifts her leg, crushing against her, and she can feel his dick on her stomach, and the water running between them, down their bodies like warm sunshine, like broken neon. She gasps when he slips inside, a grunt and a strange little airy thing, like a sigh perhaps. He starts pumping right away, no foreplay, but he's groaning a little yet not enough, so Ellie compensates for that, moaning and grunting without shame, and then he starts saying things in her ear, dirty things, things she will keep locked away for nights when he's not around.

He comes inside her, the first time he's done so, and it feels so _fucking_ great. And not only that, she lets him.

"_Fuck,"_ he wheezes, jerking again when Ellie comes around him, and then they stop, panting like they've just outran a raptidon.

"That was _filthy," _Ellie sighs, and she laughs, and he laughs too.

"Yeah. Good thing we're in the shower then."

"Alex…" she begins. "I have pills, you know. I won't get knocked up, if you're worried."

"Oh. Right. Yeah. I'd say sorry about that, but I'm really not."

"Bastard."

"Can you imagine though? Little half asshole, half jackass kids running around the ship pulling Nyoka's hair and spilling all the Lemon Slapp."

"SAM would like that."

"Yeah, he would."

"We've already got Parvati and Felix, though. No more kids on the ship."

"Fine, you win this round."

They dry off and get dressed and leave the bathroom and –

Everyone's in the kitchen.

"Oh fuck."

"Guys, we don't care if you want to fuck in the shower –"

"Yeah we do, it's gross."

"– okay, maybe we do – but please, _please_ let us know so we can blow ourselves out the airlock first."

Parvati looks scarred anyway.

000

They're on _Groundbreaker_ again.

Parvati's kicked them off the ship to have her date night with Junlei. Ellie doesn't get why the girl can't just take the woman for a drink at the Lost Hope but Parvati's always been a little weird. She just hopes both engineers don't get off on mufflers or spark plugs or whatever and bang in the engine room. On the engine.

She lights a Stogie Slim for herself and hands one to the captain.

"How many women have you slept with, Cap?"

She wants the question to catch him off guard, make him suck back the smoke and choke a little maybe, but it doesn't and that's almost funnier.

"I dunno. Five or six maybe. Why?"

"And how many did you love?"

"Just one."

"Huh. Where's she now? Or he. No judgment here."

Hawthorne sucks the Stogie back and holds it for a little too long.

"She died."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"It's fine. Knew it was coming. Cancer," he adds, and there's steel in his voice.

"Shit. Terrible way to go."

"Nah, not really."

"Why's that?"

"Cause knowing you're dying is great. People who aren't have a tendency to believe they're going to live forever."

"What do you mean?"

"If you found out you were dying, would you be nicer? Love more? Try new things?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Well, you are. We all are. People who know are the best, though, like they need to be as kind and caring in their twenty years as they would have been in a hundred."

Ellie frowns.

"I knew she had cancer even before I met her," he says, playing with the ring on his finger. "Knew she wasn't gonna grow old. Have kids, settle down, you know. But I married her anyways."

Ellie blinks.

"But – _why?_ Why put yourself through that, Cap? Why would you willingly get your heart broken like that?"

"Because I loved her."

He says it like it's supposed to make sense, but it doesn't. It simply doesn't, and she cannot comprehend it, that Alex would do something so stupid as to fall in love with a dying woman.

"What was her name?" she asks, if only to distract herself – yet she realises too late what she's done.

"Sarah," he says. "Her name was Sarah."

"Huh. Sarah."

That's all she can say.

000

She's never really had friends, not in the way most people do. She's always assumed (and her parents, too) that this was through some fault of her own. She never dressed or looked or acted the part of spoiled Byzantium brat – so there was something wrong with her. And even after university, after she'd fled that godawful white shitstain of a city, it had been much the same.

There had been others that might have become friends, if she'd spent time and effort on the endeavor. But the thing about being a merc is that you're hard to pin down. She'd spent so many years wandering that she knew dozens of settlements on all the outer worlds, but she still didn't have a permanent home, or permanent friends.

The longer they were together, this crew, the harder it would be to admit that it was a mistake, and the harder it would be for her to let them go.

Part of her wishes this time would be different. That they could become a fixture in her life, her first real friends in this strange and lonely land.

But _all that is gold does not glitter._

Or some shit like that.

000

Felix pulls a bag of Aunty Cleo's Mr. Marshy Mallows from the cupboard.

"Hey, how many marshmallows do you guys think I could fit in my mouth? Ten? Fifteen?"

"Fifteen easy," Nyoka says.

Parvati gasps. "Don't, Felix! You might choke, or puke, or –"

"Let SAM happily remind you that he's equipped to handle even the toughest of stains! Initiating deep burn removal now!"

"Woah, hey! Don't point that thing at me!"

"Potential area filth-level assessment: DISGUSTING!"

"Fine, fifteen it is, then. Boss, count for me."

"I'm counting."

"You're a hazard to society," Max groans.

Ellie smirks. "And a coward. Do twenty."

000

She almost runs into Max going up the stairs.

"Oh. I'm sorry, Doctor."

"It's fine."

But neither of them move.

It's awkward.

"Miss Fenhill –"

"Look, Vic. We don't gotta play pretend here. We're on the same ship still and neither of us is leaving. So let me put this out there – I don't like what you did on Scylla and I ain't gonna forget it. You can bandy it all you want and follow the Captain like a kicked puppy and he can think whatever he wants to think but that doesn't change the fact you almost killed him."

Max swallows, a pool of sadness in his eyes.

"I know. And I know any sort of apology will fall on deaf ears here. But I just want to say –"

Ellie doesn't let him finish.

She gets a ping later on her datapad.

_I just want to say I've changed since then. I was clinging to the way I wanted things to be, not enjoying the way they are._

_I am now._

She forgives him. But she doesn't let him know that.

000

Ellie ignores the blood coming from his nose.

"Dry air," he says.

It's not.

000

_Sarah._

She wants to know if he regrets it, if even now he wishes he'd never even met her. Was it all worth it? Was it _really_ worth the pain?

She wants to know if he'd do it all over again, if given the chance, with every kiss knowing it might be the last, going to bed not certain she would be there in the morning. Having to choose your words carefully, lest they be the last ones you ever say to them.

If he's ever going to move on, ever going to find love in someone else. If that was the plan all along.

She fell in love with Caster, but Caster wasn't dying. He was living too much, Ellie thought, and maybe that was his problem.

She's not like that, not like Hawthorne at all. Living as if you're dying, as if everyone else around you is dying too.

Ellie prefers to live as if everyone was already dead.

000

"Fuck – _Alex –"_

The man in question growls into her shoulder, driving into her, hips crushing against hers over and over. He's slicked in sweat and so is she, her nails are digging into the flesh of his back, his waist, curled tight in his unruly hair.

Ellie remembers thinking of him while she was fucking Booker, remembers looking away. Now she cannot keep her eyes from him.

But Hawthorne… doesn't look at her when they do this. He's looking anywhere but here – at the wall, at the pillow, and sometimes he can't even open his eyes at all, as if he can't bear to look at her. Like he can't look at her when almost everything about himself is a lie.

She's using him. He's using her.

It shouldn't bother her, but it does.

His thrusts become erratic and his breathing shallow, and he cries out a moment later, toppling over the edge, and Ellie follows suit soon after.

His eyes are closed. He takes a second to catch his breath, leans his forehead against hers. But his eyes are closed.

Ellie always leaves soon after they're done – she's not one to bask in the afterglow – but she stays this time.

Alex pulls out and collapses beside her. They both face the ceiling. They both breathe.

"Hey. Alex."

"Yeah."

"How old are you?"

A heartbeat.

"What do you mean?"

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-two. You know that."

"Alex – _how old are you?"_

He sighs.

He knows. It's written all over his face. He's good at tricking a lot of people, but he can't fool her anymore.

"One hundred and two. Give or take a few years."

Ah. So there it is.

Ellie supposes he must expect her to scream, to throw things and wail and cry, to demand _why? how? when?_ Or perhaps he thinks she might squeal in delight at the revelation that the _Hope_ is not lost, that hope is not lost, that Halcyon will be saved from itself.

Truthfully, she might lie somewhere in the middle.

But she's never been one for theatrics.

"You read my pings to Welles."

"Maybe. And maybe you shouldn't leave your datapad in the kitchen."

He turns onto his side to face her – and _now_ he's looking her in the eyes.

"Look, Els, I – I wanted to say something, to tell you. I really did. But – Jesus Christ, can you blame me? How insane would I have sounded? _Hello there, nice to meet you – why, yes, I am the only surviving passenger of the decades-lost colonist ship, Captain Popsicle. I shouldn't be alive but I am. Hey, want to come aboard my stolen smuggling ship and do crime with me? My only friend is a wanted fugitive and –"_

"Alex."

He's talking too much. He does that when he's nervous, she finds. But as the words spill out of his mouth, she realises that this might be the first time he's ever spoken them aloud.

How long has he been hiding this? How hard must it have been? How many questions has he dodged, how many queries about his job, his ship, his life he's fabricated?

How many _lies_ has he told her?

As if he can read her mind, the creases of his face smooth out and he smiles softly, placing a warm hand on her hip.

"I told you before, Els. None of this has been a lie. I'm not _using_ you or anything."

"Then what _are_ you doing?"

"I'm… I'm not really sure, to be totally honest with you. I'm trying to help Welles revive the colonists on the _Hope._ I'm trying to find more dimethyl sulfoxide for him. I'm trying to keep this ship in the air, and Felix and Max from killing each other, and _you_ from killing _me,_ I think."

He snickers at his own joke, but Ellie doesn't find this funny.

The laugh dies in his throat.

"Els –"

She turns away from him, towards the ceiling again.

The _Hope._ Lost. Found. A children's bedtime story. Real.

Ellie always believed in the _Hope _as a kid, really believed that, one day, the ship would come from the blackness of space and the hero from Earth would step out of the gunsmoke and freon, the deliverer of humanity, the bringer of Earth's best and brightest to the very edge of the galaxy.

Then she grew up.

And Hawthorne hardly seems like that hero.

What would three hundred thousand scientists, doctors, engineers, botanists, people utterly unshackled from the Board's chains do to a place like Halcyon? Do _for_ Halcyon?

Maybe places like Byzantium and people like her parents wouldn't exist.

Maybe the system wouldn't die a slow and painful death.

Maybe people could learn to _live_ instead of dying for a corporate slogan.

Ellie turns to him again – and he's anxious, he's wondering what she'll say, hoping she doesn't leave – yet knowing she has more than every right to.

"Hm," she smirks. "Might've guessed it on my own."

"What? That I'm a century old and born on Earth?"

"You're fucking weird, Alex. The things you say, they way you're so… clueless. I knew something was wrong with you the minute I saw you. Makes sense now."

"Uh. Thanks? I guess."

"Alex Hawthorne was the captain of this ship before you."

"Yeah. He was."

"Did you kill him?"

"No. Yes. Sort of. My escape pod landed on him."

"Ouch."

"I don't think he suffered much, if it's any consolation."

Ellie wants to ask him so many things – she wants to know how he survived, how he didn't turn to mush the second he emerged from cryo, how Welles managed to find the _Hope,_ escape the Board for so many years –

She wants to talk about Earth, about Mars, about forests and mountains and what sounds the sea makes when it crashes upon a human shore, not an alien one.

She wants to know who_ her_ Alex Hawthorne was.

She wants to know why he came here.

But more than anything, she wants to _not_ want to care about it all. To care about him. But she does.

"Look, Ellie – I get it, if you want to walk away. I'll drop you off at _Groundbreaker_ next time we dock."

Ellie blinks.

"What? Fuck that noise. I'm in this till the bitter end, Cap. I ain't leaving yet. Plus, someone's gotta make sure you don't get yourself killed on the way to liberating Halcyon or whatever. That's what you're doing, right?"

"Trying to."

"Fuck. My shit luck to be caught up in a fairy tale like this. You sure we're still not in the hermit's shack on Scylla?"

"Ha! No, I fucking hope not."

"Thank the Architect. Don't think I'll ever get baked again."

Hawthorne smiles.

"Thanks, Els. I owe you."

"Yeah, you do. _Although,"_ she leers, trailing her nails across his stomach, "I can think of a few ways to pay off your debt."

He laughs.

Ellie loves the sound.

And something foreign begins to blossom in her chest – something close to _hope._

000

Hawthorne sits them down in the kitchen and tells the rest of the crew.

The results are varied and somewhat comical:

Felix reacts in exactly the way she thought, all starry-eyed and doughy and half a step closer up Hawthorne's ass than he was even before.

Nyoka wants to know if he brought any Earth whiskey with him.

Parvati quivers and stammers and asks a million questions a minute, mostly about cars and airplanes and real, actual ships that float in the ocean and not in the air.

SAM intends to immediately disinfect his quarters in case any Earth borne disease or contaminants followed him across the stars.

Max says he knew all along, of course. _Of course._

And all of them are with him until the end.

But when the Captain says they're going to Byzantium next, Ellie's heart freezes.

She's not ready to face her ghosts.

* * *

**A/N: I'm sorry but I refuse to believe Max got over his issues so quickly. I made him suffer a little more here.**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Hey again! Here's chapter 4. Angst and fluff and sadness and more angst and a little bit of sexytimes for you. Also spoilers.**

**One more chapter after this one.**

**Thanks for all the lovely reviews and kudos! Enjoy!**

* * *

"So. You threw off the constrains of proper society and abandoned a life of luxury to live as an outlaw."

"You finally get me, Vicar."

"Regret it?"

"Let's see – I got freedom, independence, and – _usually_ – space from people telling me how to live my life."

"And how long before you reckon you'll end up back where you began?"

"See, I knew there was a lecture coming."

"The universe has a way of snapping you back to where you're supposed to be, Fenhill."

000

The _Unreliable_ sinks towards the surface of Terra 2 just as the sun is going down, scattering a million little pinpricks of dazzling aurous light across the white buildings of the capital city – a sensational show, unlike anything her crew has ever seen.

Byzantium is like that – a show, pretty on the top, cold and hard beneath the powder and glue.

"I haven't been here in – shit, over ten years now."

She says it with too much provocation, too much force. She does that to hide the tremble in her voice.

Because Ellie is terrified of this place.

She read a poem once – can't remember by who or what it was really about, now – but part of it said people leave something of themselves behind when they leave a place. Part of you stays there, even if you go away. And there are things in us we can only find again by going back there.

She stares down at the spires of stone thrust from the earth like broken teeth, like a dragon's maw, rising like a wave to swallow them. To swallow her.

Ellie doesn't like who she was when she was here. She doesn't want to find it again.

000

"So. This is where you're from."

Ellie blinks back the light as it reflects off the white stone. She lights a cigarette for herself and Nyoka and leans against the fountain in the middle of the square, wishing Hawthorne would hurry up and just rob the guard already, and wishing she'd brought her sunglasses.

She sucks in the Stogie. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is."

"You sound thrilled."

"Sure. Nice to be back on solid ground, feel the sun on your skin again. Byzantium always did have the nicest sun. Good for tanning, if you… care about that sort of shit."

A gaggle of pretentious young women turn their noses up as they pass them, chattering disapprovals under their breath. Ellie stares right back.

Nyoka sucks in her Stogie and goes to lean beside the doctor.

"I can read you like I can read the Rideout Swamps."

"The fuck's that mean?"

"Means you're smelly and soggy and full of rapt shit."

"Har har."

"Nah, I mean it. Something's up with you, girl. You know, you can tell me. I won't go blabbing to the others about it."

Ellie bites her cheek. "Nothing's up, Nyoka. I just – I don't have very good memories of this place. I'm not in love with my planet like you are." She shrugs. "Just – I'd rather not be here, is all."

The hunter is flitting her eyes across Ellie's face, looking for something there. Whether or not she finds it, Ellie really doesn't want to know.

"Huh. Y'know, kinda reminds me of something I once heard a sawbones say."

Ellie glances at Nyoka.

"_Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending."_

That puts a bad taste in her mouth – and Ellie doesn't recall the Stogies going stale.

"I put this place behind me years ago. It's over."

"It's never over," the hunter says. "This is your home, no matter how far or how long you run from it. It'll always be a part of you."

"_Fuck_ this place," Ellie seethes, scowling at the sun, the buildings, the very air of this Law-forsaken city. "There's nothing for me here. There never was."

"Maybe. But maybe there is. And it might not be over – not yet, maybe not ever. And maybe you can't put it behind you – sometimes the pain just runs too deep. I know that better than anyone. But that still don't mean you gotta let it hurt."

Ellie sighs, swallowing down something old and painful.

"You just gotta let it go."

000

She feels like such an imposter, a ghost of a ghost drifting down the streets she used to know. And like a sliver of light in a dampened, muted dream, a sharp memory slips inside with every step she takes.

She will never belong here. She knows this.

000

"Hey, Felix."

"Yeah Doc?"

"Don't talk out loud. You'll lower the IQ of the entire street."

000

Alex says he knows what he's doing, but Alex says a lot of things.

He has no fucking clue where to go from here.

So, naturally, the crew finds themselves in the local bar again.

The place is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago, Ellie thinks, the ceiling too tall and the lights too bright and the counter too polished but the booze is decent and it doesn't smell like sulfur or cigarettes so it's got something on the other dives they've sloshed around in.

"Filthy pirate _trash."_

Oh, right. Yeah. She remembers why she hates this place.

"What'd you say to me?" Ellie seethes, rounding on the man a little brokenly, sloppy with drink.

"You heard me, doll."

"You piece of _fuckin' –"_

"That's enough, Ellie," Hawthorne warns, tugging at her sleeve. "Not worth it."

The doctor shakes the Captain off and stares down at the man so severely Ellie thinks she might make him spontaneously combust. "Stand up and say that to my face."

The man does, setting his drink aside and rising from the stool. He towers over Ellie, over Alex, and his mother must have fucked a Primal, the guy is so _big._

"You're filthy pirate rabble. The whole lot of you," he growls, waggling a finger at the crew in the booth. "You don't belong here. All the detergent in Byzantium couldn't wash the filth from your – what is that, a dirty pillowcase?" he laughs, pinching the corner of Ellie's jacket.

"It's a bomber, you uncultured _fuck,"_ she seethes, slapping his hand away.

"Come on, Els," Alex presses. "Listen, sir, let's just drop this. We don't want any trouble, really. We were just leaving anyway."

He nods to the others and they rise from the booth, Felix protesting lightly.

Hawthorne puts a hand to the small of her back, and Ellie lets herself be led away to the door of the bar.

"That's right, take your cunt home. Keep her on a leash next time."

There's a heartbeat.

Then Alex reels.

He lets go of Ellie and stalks back to the man, positively fuming. He balls the collar of his shirt in one fist and strikes the man across the face with the other, sending him reeling back into the bar stool, foundering over it, laying him flat on his ass.

"Don't you _dare_ call her a cunt, you fucking sleezy piece of horse shit. She's got bigger balls than you'll ever have. Than _any_ of you."

The place is deathly still, stagnating in the innocence unmarred by violence and bar fights.

For a moment.

Then the man's friends step in.

"You scrawny little _shit,"_ one of them growls, heaving Hawthorne up by his collar – and then Felix's fist swings around in an effortless haymaker, clapping the man across the jaw, sending spittle flying out at the Captain.

Felix's eyes are wide and he flexes his sore knuckles a moment, before a smile splits his face and Nyoka smiles and Alex must have smiled back because _all fucking Hell_ breaks loose.

Chairs fly and fists fly and beer and glass and curses fly, and someone pulls at Ellie's hair before she swivels and punts them ruthlessly hard in the crotch. Max screams something and ducks beneath a tossball bat, his feverish smile pink with blood not his own, and Parvati retreats into a corner before withdrawing her wrench and Nyoka smashes a kitschy bar sign over someone's head and SAM keeps switching between sweeping up glass and knocking heads together and Felix is absolutely in his prime, gelastic and cursing and clouting, and then someone shrieks for the guards and the crew hightails it out of there, spattered in blood and alcohol, and fueled by alcohol and thrills, and they blunder out into the street, more alive than maybe they've ever been.

"Fuck," Ellie wheezes, catching her breath in a narrow alley as the corporate guards jog by. "Fuck, Alex, that was –"

He twists his fingers through her hair and crushes his lips to hers in a bruising, breathless way, and when he pulls back he smiles, and laughs, and there's blood running down his face and his hair is stuck-up and sweat-slicked and there's a fire in his eyes, a keening sort of mischief that makes Ellie want to see that in his eyes more often, for many more years to come.

She wipes the blood from his brow gently, softly, and places a hand on his cheek.

"You know, Alex Hawthorne – out of everyone I've ever met, I think I hate you the least."

He laughs again, clasping her hand with his own.

"Yeah. Yeah, I don't hate you either."

000

The drinking glass shatters on the kitchen floor and Ellie turns around.

"Hey, boss, you alright?"

"Yeah, Felix, I just – I'm fine," Alex says, staring down at his hand in confusion, gingerly bending his fingers. "I'm… fine."

He's not.

Even Felix doesn't believe him.

000

They're standing outside the university. Ellie hates this place, probably more than any other place in the universe.

She almost wants to go inside again, nearly walks down the path and up the stairs through that great wooden door, if only to feel the pallid medical exam lights on her skin once more, the stench of disinfectant and medicine stinging her nose, taste the dusty tomes and hollow echo of the halls deep in her bones.

She doesn't know why she wants to. Maybe just to taste her youth again, those days when the first stirrings of rebellion began to flicker in her heart. Or perhaps she thinks she might reach some sort of… understanding, maybe, a kind of acceptance or peace with it all, but she knows she might never get there. That would be far too easy.

She doesn't know why she wants to. But she knows even less why she doesn't.

She takes a long drag of her Stogie. She passes it to Hawthorne.

The man sucks it in. Lets it out. Then glances down at the thing, a smile splitting his face.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's just – you know, I haven't smoked a cigarette in seventy years? I quit the day before the _Hope_ left."

"You're having one now."

"No, I mean, a_ real_ cigarette, one with tobacco and tar and stuff. Not this – what is it called, tobaccorn? It's just… slightly _off._ Like a shadow of the real thing."

He shrugs.

"Suppose I'll never smoke one again."

"You miss it?"

Ellie's asking about the cigarettes, but it hangs there in the air:

_Do you miss Earth?_

_Do you miss your old life?_

_Do you wish you stayed behind?_

He glances at the Stogie a moment longer, eyes glassy, and Ellie wishes she knew what he was thinking, wants to know if there are memories attached to cigarettes and he's flicking through them now, like a rolodex of moments in time.

Maybe his parents caught him smoking at fourteen behind the video store with his friends. Maybe the smoke curls up from the ashtray beside the bed where he first falls in love with Sarah. Maybe he crushes one beneath his boot and turns and walks away.

He shrugs again, flicking the burnt-out cig on the grass of the university commons.

"Nah. These are good enough now."

000

_Byzantium._

An ancient city on Earth, Alex tells her. It's beginning shrouded in mystery, the city rose and fell, changed hands, changed names, gave birth to an empire, a religion, fell again, rose again, _endured._

But everything that has a beginning must also have an end.

"Rome wasn't built in a day," he says. "But it was destroyed in one."

000

"How are you doing, Ellie?"

"What? I'm fine, Vic. Why do you ask?"

"Because we're in Byzantium. You haven't been here in a decade, and you didn't exactly leave on the best terms."

"How do you know about all that? Who told you?"

"Your face. It's got an unmistakably darker scowl to it than normal."

000

Ellie finds herself wandering into the Captain's quarters.

He's slumped in his office chair, legs crossed, frowning down at his datapad.

Ellie keeps being struck with how… _hollow_ he looks compared to when she first met him, all those months ago in the med bay, despite the kinematics Mfuru installed. He's thinner and paler and his eyes sink lower, but they're still bright and sharp and daring, still his.

"Hey," he says, barely glancing at her as the door hisses shut.

"Hey. What're you up to?"

"Not much. Just – finishing up some things, you know. Trying to figure out how the Hell we're going to break into those labs and steal the dimethyl sulfoxide for Welles."

"Have you considered just asking them for it?"

"I have, yeah. Unfortunately, ADA doesn't calculate any scenario where we make it out of that conversation with all our blood still inside our bodies."

"Yikes."

He sets his datapad face down on the desk, rising from his chair with a wince, turning his full attention to her.

He looks so_ old_ despite his young age – like those seventy years he spent asleep are finally starting to catch up with him.

"Maybe you should try talk to Clarke."

"Clarke? Why?"

"He's the Minister. He's got to know something. Remember that night at the bar? When you fucked that big guy's face because of your little man syndrome?"

"Excuse me, I thought it was rather chivalrous. Also, fucking _SAM _is tiny compared to that guy."

"Fine, whatever, you're my hero."

"ADA, record this conversation please."

"Yes Captain. Recording."

"Do go on, Doctor."

"Architect, you're hopeless."

"Right now, yes. Until we get the chemicals for Welles. Then we'll have _Hope."_

"It's a shame you never had kids. You have a wicked arsenal of bad dad jokes."

"I know, right? Felix and Parvati are bad influences. Anyways, about Clarke."

"Right. I overheard that guard in the pub boast about how he had front-door access to the Minister's house. Maybe we shank him, steal his card, and rough up Clarke a bit. He's Board, you know. Flimsy as a boned saltuna. He'll break."

Hawthorne grins at her. Moves a little closer. Places his hand on her waist.

"That's… not half bad, Els," he hums, breath ghosting down her neck. "Knew I kept you around for something."

"Yeah. Something," she agrees, sliding her hand beneath the waistband of his sweats.

There's something in the way his eyes flutter, the little sigh he lets go, in the brush of his lips against her cheek that has Ellie reminding herself that she's using him for sex, for fun, and that's all it is.

That's all it is.

Hawthorne presses her against the desk, grips at her hips, and pulls her into a kiss that almost seems as if he's reminding himself of that too.

000

"What's up, Millstone? You look like you've been dragged through the mud by a horny raptidon."

"I'm just tired is all, Doc. I woke up at four this morning to put fake spiders in Max's bed before he wakes."

"Architect, I wish I could care about something as much as you care about ruining Vicky's life."

000

"I used to play here as a kid," she says, pushing lightly off the ground from the swing, fingers wrapped tight around the cold chain. "Used to come here when my parents fought – which was a lot, even for upper-class snobs. Used to climb that tree, right over there," she nods, out toward the knobbly old thing in the corner of the playground. "Used to climb it and pretend I was flying a ship out in space. Ha. Even then, I wanted to leave."

000

Ellie fucks him when she's angry. She fucks him when she's sad. She fucks him when she's horny or frustrated or just plain bored.

She's never fucked him simply because she wanted to, though.

His hands are soft, now, and getting softer every time they do this, and they dig into her hips less and wander across her face more, fluttering across her eyelids and cheeks sometimes. His tongue doesn't go in interesting places any more – no, it dips beneath her jaw and sometimes between her breasts, but mostly just her lips, now. He still whispers dirty things in her ear, but they're funny, now, a little joke between them, like they really don't mean anything anymore, and the way he says her name has gone from _Ellie_ to _Els…_

Softer, simpler, warmer.

Ellie ignores it.

And when he comes inside her, as he often does, now, he doesn't get up and go, or make her leave – he sighs, kissing her softly, holding her gently, and keeping her close to his chest.

Ellie ignores it.

She ignores the way he smiles at her between the silent moments, and the way he runs a hand down her side, and makes her laugh when he whispers something so terribly, stupidly funny in her ear, and she hates the way she loves it.

Hates the way he makes her feel so utterly trapped in this, in his arms, yet so unbelievably…_ safe._

Relying on others for your wellbeing is what gets you killed in the end.

Just ask Caster.

Ask Sarah.

"I'm sorry we're here, Ellie," he says, chest rumbling, nose warm on the back of her neck, right as she's on the very edge of sleep. "I know what it's like, being back in a place you hate. Hell, I couldn't get far enough away. I had to leave the system."

He chuckles, and Ellie cannot help but smile a little.

He has the idea even before she does, and yet she's always known she'd end up back there again anyway.

Back home. Her parents.

No, _not_ home – that house. Those people who raised her.

Yeah. _There._

"I'll go with you," he breathes.

"Thanks."

"I'll go anywhere."

Ellie hesitates.

"I know."

000

Byzantium is a place of pulsating whiteness, of pallid nothing and sameness, flat as a river and shallow as one, too. Like a river, it pretends it is on some great journey, some fantastical adventure to a great wide _somewhere _– but not to you, of course, you who stand by the shore and look upon the ones in yachts and liners, the ones whose money and bloodlines weaved a rope ladder that will only pull _them_ up if they're drowning.

Ellie had a rope, once. She cut it and tossed it out to sea long ago.

Now she drifts unmoored and free.

She manages to slip away from the _Unreliable_ one night, just to breathe and think, yet her mind is too far in the gutter because Felix manages to tag along and when she can't shake him, she gives up, and in a flash of compassion that she almost instantly regrets, Ellie takes him with her to a place she holds very dear to her. The only place in Byzantium, she thinks. A rose between the thorns.

"Hey, Doc, you better not be taking me up here just to shoot me and leave me for dead. Or toss me off the roof. Or – take _advantage_ of me."

Ellie grumbles, but it's really more to cover her chuckle.

"Felix, if I ever kill you, it'll be day, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed."

"Huh. Are you always this sentimental?"

"I had a good day."

They take the elevator to the top of the Halcyon Holdings Corporation headquarters, slip through a maintenance tunnel, and climb the emergency ladder up to the roof, to the very top of the city – and they're dangling in the wind atop the tallest tower, like a torn flag clinging to a pole, right in the centre of it all, and it's almost like being back on _Groundbreaker _again, all the little lights twinkling below, the people crawling through the streets like ants, through the spires of stone like jagged weeds around them.

The milk crates are still there, Ellie thinks with a smile, still standing obstinately in this place they don't belong, and she sits down on one, and Felix on another, and –

"Holy _shit."_

Looking up, Felix and Ellie see a million little stars glittering deep in the velvet of a night with no moon. Even the lights of the city cannot touch them, not here. Ellie knows them all, their stories and their names, from her days in school and her days navigating aboard freighters. She knows them in a familiar way, the way she knows her own hands. The way she knows her friend.

It's quiet here. More quiet than the _Unreliable _at night, than the unending plains of Monarch, than the absolute deafness of space.

"You know, I never left _Groundbreaker _until the Captain took me away," he says. "I never saw the stars before. Well, you know what I mean. Out the windows of the ship, sure, but not like this – not like how they're supposed to be seen."

"Yeah. This is really something, ain't it?"

"Fuck, there's so many."

"Byzantium has the densest collection of star clusters and nebulas in the Halcyon system. Only the Earth system is denser, because it's closer to the centre of the galaxy."

"Law, Doc, I ain't no science major. I didn't understand a word you just said."

"Lots of stars. See them best here."

"Right. Got it."

"You know, I used to come out here sometimes by myself. At night, I mean."

"Yeah?" Felix hums, still gawking at the stars.

"Yeah. Used to keep me sane, I guess. I did it when something was on my mind, or I needed to think things over. There's just – something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is. How far apart we all are. Also, it's a great spot to get high once in a while, without the corporate guards dragging you home for 'indecent public indecencies."

"Ha! Yeah. Well, I kinda feel…_ big_ in all this. Like we're a part of something bigger, you know, something _more_ – like I was meant for more than just picking pockets and moving cargo on _Groundbreaker_ all my life."

Ellie thinks about lighting a Stogie, but worries it might blot out the sky.

"Yeah. I know exactly what you mean, kid."

"No you don't. You had everything, Ellie."

"Yeah. Everything except freedom and purpose and parents who gave a shit about anything but themselves."

"Least you_ had_ folks."

"You're lucky sometimes, you know. Having no one. You don't owe anybody anything. Better than having someone who makes you feel like nothing. Like you owe them simply for existing."

"At least what you had was _something._ Good or bad, it was real, it was tangible."

"Wow. Big words, Felix. Who taught you that?"

"Max. But it doesn't matter, it's true. You had something, and that made you _you._ I had nothing, and that makes me – nothing, I guess."

"Hey, don't say that, Millstone. You've got the biggest heart – and the biggest balls I've ever seen. And shitty parents or a stuck-up life didn't give you any of that. _You_ did."

Felix sighs, holding his head in his hands tiredly.

"I always imagined my parents were heroes, you know. Someone cool and brave and who had a ship and who almost died saving a planet from an asteroid or something, and they left me behind to keep me safe, and, well – I know they were probably just some young kids, or some soldier who knocked up a whore and didn't know it, but that kept me going for a long, long time. Waiting for my ship to come get me. To take me away."

"I always imagined my parents were actually robots. That would explain a lot."

"Ha! Who knows, maybe they are, just like in episode fifty-eight of _Space Hospital: Night Shift._"

"For someone who never went to school, Felix, you are the nerdiest kid I've ever met."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

They're quiet for a long time. Ellie watches the stars wheel ahead, listens to the breeze whistling off the stone spires like a howling beast of Monarch. She almost nods off to sleep before Felix speaks again.

"I don't know," he almost whispers. "Maybe it _was _just an accident. Or maybe it was all meant to be, like fate or destiny or something, like Max says. Law, I don't know – and you better not go blabbing to anybody about this, Doc, I swear. I don't – I don't know what it is that made me cross paths with you all, but I can't deny my ship came in exactly when it needed to."

Felix looks so young, she thinks, and Ellie realises he can't be much older than nineteen or twenty at most – just a kid, in all retrospect. He hasn't seen the stars. He hasn't seen the worlds. Fuck, he hasn't done a lot of things, and he hasn't had anybody to do it with.

He's crying. Well, not crying, but he's nearly failing to hold back tears.

Ellie's heart does a strange thing, then, and without a thought, she pulls the boy close to her chest, embracing him, running a hand over his arm and through his hair like the mother he deserved but never got.

He breaks into a sob, a heavy, deep cry that echoes out into the night, over the city, yet no one can hear but them.

000

"Got any more of those drugs, Vicky? That shit we smoked in your room that night. Oh, wait – do I have to use the prison name? Whaddya call 'em in the clink – candy? Papers?"

"Drugs."

"Boring. How about Cripple Sticks?"

"No."

"Fine, what about –"

"Ellie, I don't have any mushflower tokes left."

"Not even if I trade you some cigarettes?"

"No. I got rid of them after – after Scylla. Probably for the best. They can lead to insanity as easily as enlightenment."

"You know, I think I liked the old Vicky better. This one's boring."

000

They lay in his bed and she doesn't even ask him to, but once he starts talking about it, the words come out and they don't hardly stop.

He tells her about whales. He tells her about oceans. He tells her about rainforests and tigers and horses and dogs. He tells her about dinosaurs, and how they were real, and lived long before any human ever showed up. He tells her they managed to bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction, and the uproar that caused, how people thought they were playing God.

He tells her about God. He tells her about Buddha. He tells her about the wars and the politics and the way people kill each other so easily over something so stupid as a different belief or colour of skin.

Ellie rather thinks that world is far more fairy-tale than anything else in Halcyon.

"But what I miss the most, I think, are apples. _Real_ apples. Not your silly Spacer's Choice mock-apple thing. Crunchy and juicy and so _fucking_ good. The taste of apples is what I miss. And I miss picking them. They smell like fall, like back to school, like leaves changing colour. I miss that the most."

He tells her about the seasons, the way the world turns and circles the sun, and with it comes the snow and the cold and then, sure as the ground beneath their feet, the rains and the flowers and green things again, over and over, in an endless circle.

Halcyon doesn't have that. It doesn't have life, doesn't have changing and growing and moving. Halcyon has terra-formed _sameness._

And then, just before he drifts off to sleep, she hears him say to her:

"When this is all over, I'm going to make some scientist bring back real apples. Then you're going to try one. Then you're going to take me right out to the edge of the system, like you said. I haven't seen a sky without stars. You'll have to show me."

Ellie dreams again, but this time it's not about her parents, not about Caster and the _Silvercove. _

It's about apples and dolphins and big hairy elephants.

000

"I threw all my dolls down here once," Ellie muses, leaning over the railing, gazing down into the murky water below. "Every last one. Even the one my grandmother gave me, made on Earth, over two centuries old. It had real straw hair and beach sand in its eyes. I hated them. Hated how they dressed, how they were always smiling. Hated how much my mother loved them. And I thought, maybe, if I threw them all away, she'd get upset or feel sorry for me, take me out for ice cream – you know, give a shit. But all she said was _don't worry, I'll buy you more._ And she did. My grandmother's doll meant nothing to her, after all. Hm. Figures. I don't think anything did."

000

Ellie stands on the doorstep of her parent's house.

This is where she grew up, the space beyond this door. This is where she lived and studied and worked and slept and cried and hated it, and this is the last door she walked out of more than ten years ago.

She's about to walk into it again.

"What do you suppose they'll say?" she asks him, even though she knows exactly what they'll say.

"Does it matter?" he says, and it's almost like he knows she knows what's about to happen. The only one who ever could, really. "I'll be right here. Don't think they'll try anything, but I'm not afraid to pop a cap in your old man's ass either way. _Any _way this goes. Uh… you said your parents are rich, right?"

Ellie chuckles, the last thing she ever thought she'd do when she came back here.

"Please don't. I don't want to explain that one to the corporate guards."

"Fine, fine, I won't."

He takes her hand. More than that, she doesn't pull away.

They step inside together.

000

"ADA?"

"Yes, Doctor Fenhill?"

"Who was Hawthorne before he was Hawthorne?"

"I am sorry, I do not understand the question, Doctor."

"Alex. You know, the Captain. Who was he before?"

"Before what, Doctor?"

"Alex wasn't always Alex. His escape pod landed on the real Alex Hawthorne and killed him, right?"

"Correct."

"So who is the Captain now?"

"Alex Hawthorne is the Captain of the _Unreliable."_

"I know, I mean, who was he before?"

"Before what?"

"_Before he killed the first Alex."_

"There's only one Alex, and that is Captain Alex Hawthorne of the _Unreliable."_

"Ugh. You're enjoy this, aren't you?"

"Perhaps a little."

000

"Hey. Um… I'm sorry about your folks, Ellie."

"Don't be. I'm just sorry I forgot to raid the liquor cabinet before we left."

"I… know that's a joke, but… be careful. I lost someone once. After I buried him, I raided his Iceberg stash for a bit of comfort, and I ain't stopped drinking since."

"Thanks, Nyoka, I appreciate the thought, but I'm fine. Really. In fact, I'm better than fine. I'm great. I've got all their money now. They might actually have to go out and work for a living."

"Look, I know what it's like, trying to forget your past. Hell, I think the whole crew knows. And maybe I'm not the best one to come to, but I'm always here if you wanna talk."

"I… thanks."

"No problem."

"Actually, I do want to ask you something."

"Yeah?"

"How do you – I don't know. Cope?"

"Ha! I don't cope well, Doc. You know that. My bottle of vodka knows that."

"Fine, not _cope,_ then. Just… _move on,_ I guess."

"Move on."

"Yeah."

"Well, I didn't, for a long time. I sat and stewed in my own shit, blaming everyone but me. Then you and the Captain came along and – and helped me bury them. My Charon family. You just gotta bury it with dirt, Doc, not with alcohol or drugs. You gotta bury it, and then you gotta put one foot in front of the other, every day for the rest of your life. What else can you do? You ain't gotta show your folks that you're living fine despite them – you gotta do it for_ you._ That's how you move on."

000

Ellie doesn't listen to Nyoka.

She totters down the stairs towards the Captain's quarters, the world sort of lurching and hazy, bottle of the hunter's whiskey on her breath.

Hawthorne almost runs into her going up.

"Oh! Shit, Els, I'm sorry," he says, and pauses when he notices the drink, putting his hands on her shoulders. "Hey. You alright?"

Ellie swallows down the bile and rye in her throat, putting a little swing into her hips.

"Heyyy, Cap. I've been missing you the last couple days," she slurs, the man going frustratingly in and out of focus.

"Have you now?"

"Where've you been?" she purrs, running a coy hand up his arm.

He frowns.

"I've been talking with Clarke. Your idea worked, you know. He's given us the key to his office in the Ministry of Accuracy and Morale. So far I've –"

"You shaved," Ellie murmurs, staring up at his face now through half-lidded eyes focussing on nothing. "Looks good."

She goes to touch his jaw, to feel the short, neat stubble there, to trace her fingers along his throat, but he grabs her wrist before she does.

"Ellie. You're drunk."

_Fuck._ Her name on his lips always sounded good, but now, desperate, all she can imagine is what it will sound like, over and over, panted out in breathless moans and groans and –

"Yeah. A little."

"You smell like a bottle of moonshine, for God's sake."

She shrugs.

"Nyoka's fault."

"Is it now?"

"Mhm."

Ellie trails the fingers of her free hand down his chest, pawing at his waist.

"Hm. You up for a little fun, Cap?"

He frowns at her.

"Els, you should… go to bed. Come on. I'll take you back."

Her fingers wander further down, ghosting over his hips, and she hooks them round his belt, smiling lewdly.

"Just a quickie. That's all I need."

"Ellie –"

With a feral growl, Ellie heaves the entirety of her small frame against Alex's much taller one, taking him by surprise, swinging him round by his belt and hurling him against the cold prefab metal of the ship hull. He slams his back against it with a hard thud, the impact nearly winding him.

"You talk too fucking much," she growls, fumbling his belt buckle with one hand and simultaneously bringing a knee up to press between his legs. She can feel him through his jeans against her thigh, and it sends a hot rush of need to her lower belly.

"Els…" Alex says, and the sound of her name on his lips again nearly drives her off the motherfucking edge.

She forces her other hand free from her grasp and snakes it up into his hair, yanking his head down to her level, crushing her lips against his in a violent, bruising kiss.

He tastes like Stogie Slims and Lemon Slapp and he smells like leather and _Alex_ and she can feel his short stubble against her cheek, her lips. She sucks and pulls at his lips and their teeth crash together, vicious and needy and then she moans into it and _fucking fuck almighty_ the guy needs to fuck her right now.

"Els," he says again, "I… _no."_

It's only then, when Ellie pauses for a second, does she realise that Hawthorne is _not_ kissing her back.

She ignores him.

"I want you, Cap," she growls, slipping her tongue into his mouth again, pulling violently at the belt that won't unbuckle fast enough, before giving up and plunging her hand down the front of his jeans, grabbing him harsh enough to elicit a sharp hiss through his teeth. "I want you. Inside me. _Now."_

"Ellie, no."

"Just – _mmn _– just shut up and fuck me."

"No, not like this."

Ellie's growing angry.

"Just – fuck, Alex, shut the fuck up and – and just let me have this."

She crushes her lips to his in a bruising sort of way, so hard that she can taste blood on her tongue, and she digs her fingers deep into the flesh of his hips, pulling him to her harder, faster, _now,_ and yeah, it might be a bit desperate, but Ellie's never been one to hang too much onto her pride.

Because Ellie wants to forget.

She wants to use him to fuck away all the memories of this place – she thinks back to a time, some other place – Monarch, maybe, the first time they slept together – and pretends that's what this is, pretends that's where they are, pretends that's what they're doing.

She pretends, pretends, pretends.

But reality has this awful way of flinging you back.

"Ellie, _stop."_

The authority in his voice is severe, rare enough that, even in her state, she listens to him.

The ship is deathly quiet, and his lips are swollen and red, blood staining his skin from her teeth. She lets go of him, pulls her hand out of his pants.

"Hey. Hey, are you alright, Els?"

Ellie sighs, running a hand through her sweaty hair.

No sense in lying about it.

"Yeah. Yeah, I just – I got a lot of things on my mind."

"No shit."

All Ellie wants him to do is leave her, let her lie here in embarrassment and let her drown in her memories and loneliness, but he doesn't – he puts his arm around her waist and pulls her to him, cradling her against his warmth, and Ellie nearly cries at the closeness of it all, of the very vulnerable yet _safe_ way he makes her feel. She can feel his heart beneath her ear, steady and strong, always there, and he rests his chin on her head and just holds her.

Just holds her, and nothing else.

It's nothing, and yet it's everything.

000

"Vicky, you're like the dad I never had."

"What? You don't have a father? I was sure you did."

"Well I mean I do, but he sucks."

000

"Hey, Els," Hawthorne says, datapad in hand.

"Hey."

"You know, I was just thinking…"

Ellie frowns.

"…yes?"

"Uh, umm – right, you know, what's his name," he struggles, scowling in concentration. He shuts his eyes tight, thinking. "The… doctor, from…_fuck,"_ he seethes, turning away in poorly concealed embarrassment.

Ellie swallows.

This is not the first time he's forgotten Dr. Welles' name.

Or Lilya Hagen's.

Or hers.

000

"This is where I met him."

It's an unassuming little place, really, just a storefront with a stone bench and an artificial tree in an oversized pot, exactly like every other storefront and bench and artificial tree in an oversized pot, but this is the place where the old Ellie died and the new Ellie began.

"Who?"

"Caster."

"Oh."

And what else can he say?

She sits down on the bench, cold and hard beneath her ass, and Hawthorne sits beside her.

She lights a Stogie and offers him one.

"Met the bastard right here, on this very bench. I was sitting here, waiting for the owner to bring out a bag of nanners. My mother sent me to the store to get some, for her nanner bread – terrible shit, always hated the stuff, it was too dry. Then Caster sat down right there, right where you are, and –"

"_And where you going?"_

_The handsome ship captain smiles._

"_Anywhere but here."_

He always knew exactly what to say.

Hawthorne takes a long drag of his cigarette.

"I met Sarah on a park bench too."

"Hm. No shit."

"Hey, I really did. Well, I knew of her through a friend of a friend who set us up before that – he was in remission and knew her from a support group he went to, but, you know," he shrugs, "I actually met her on the bench."

Ellie wants to ask it, but she doesn't know how, can't find the words without sounding… brash.

Ellie wants to know what you say when you meet a dying person.

And then what you say when you fall in love with them.

Hawthorne sucks in again, eyes glassy and faraway, smiling a little.

Ellie knows he's thinking back to that day almost a century ago, beneath a tree in a park on the bench, and that he's thinking of the way Sarah smiled when she first saw him, and how soft her skin felt when they shook hands, and how his eyes probably lit up like they did in the alley after the barfight, alive and raw, and she wants to know how often he goes back there, in his mind, how frequently he visits that park, how many times he's dreamed of that bench and the things they said as they sat and fell in love.

"You would've liked her, I think."

Ellie swallows and looks away, if only to hide the tears threatening to well up past the brim of her eyes.

"Yeah, well, you would've hated Caster."

"You think?"

"I know."

There's a bench in both the stories, she thinks, and the middle is the same, too – falling in love, that is – and even in the end the both of them die.

But Ellie killed Caster.

And Alex lost Sarah.

How un-fucking-_fair._

"Huh. So, did you ever get them?"

"Get what?"

"The nanners for your mother."

Ellie smiles a bit at that one.

"No. Never did. Walked away from here and right onto the _Silvercove,_ and I never looked back."

"I left the funeral and jumped on the _Hope _the next day. Never even said goodbye to my parents. Guess they thought I offed myself."

Hawthorne winces.

"Hm. If there's one thing I regret, it's probably that."

"Well, I regret not poisoning the nanners before I left."

Alex smiles, and it's a small, timid, painful thing.

He takes his hand in hers and squeezes.

Ellie squeezes back.

Ellie lets go.

000

In the Ministry of Accuracy and Morale, Hawthorne stands in front of a row of human test subjects, chewing his lip in thought.

"Fuck. A preacher and a doctor. I thought you're supposed to be good at giving advice."

He's trying to decide whether to steal all the dimethyl sulfoxide Welles needs or to leave most of it to keep the subjects alive. Max doesn't know what to say, and neither does Ellie. In truth, she doesn't give a sprat's ass about the test subjects in vitro, because they're bound to die anyway and it's not like the Board will reward them for it in the end. All she cares about is hurrying the fuck up because the corporate guards are bound to find them sooner rather than later.

But Ellie doesn't say that.

"It's… an intriguing conundrum, Captain, I must admit."

"Ha! No shit," he breathes, running a hand through his hair.

Ellie doesn't know why this is so moralising for him, why this is different than the dozens of spacers and marauders and other assholes they've killed, why he can't just pull the plug and let them die – hundreds of thousands of others are depending on them, so what's a handful here, now?

"Because they're innocent," he says. "Fuck, this is some real Omelas shit."

"Omelas?"

"You know, the story. _The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."_

"No, I don't."

"I'm familiar with the work," Max says, frowning. "A tale of internal conflict. The fictional city of Omelas is perfect, a utopia, but their happiness is dependent upon the horrific suffering of a single child, locked away in a cellar. Omelas cannot exist without it. After learning of the secret as children themselves, the citizens fight with themselves in trying to understand the concepts of misery and joy, and whether or not to leave Omelas or accept the terrible justice of reality."

Max pauses.

"Most stay."

Ellie rolls her eyes.

"How about we debate the meaning of the universe _after _we get the Hell out of here?"

"I can let them die and save everyone aboard the Hope," Alex continues to Ellie's chagrin, "or I can let them live and doom the rest."

"You can stay in Omelas or you can leave it," Max mumbles. "Not an easy choice, Captain."

Hawthorne ponders the people in the tubes, his brows quirked in deep, deep thought.

"Yeah. But the story is called _The Ones Who Walk Away,_ not _The Ones Who Stay."_

In the end, Alex stays.

He kills the subjects and takes all the gas.

Ellie's nightmares are made of their screams for many, many years afterward.

000

The colony is dying.

And really, Ellie is not surprised.

The terraforming isn't working. The earth is too sour. The water is too salty. The food is not healthy. The air is slowly bleeding them dry.

The entire colony is starving, everyone is dying, and all Ellie can do is laugh.

Because the Board is going to kill the _Hope_ colonists and use the ship as a prison.

Oh, yeah. The Board knew about the_ Hope_ all along.

It's a punch in the gut to the crew, of course, but it's the greatest one-liner Ellie's ever heard.

Clarke's terminal told them all this. It also told them where to find the dimethyl sulfoxide, and they steal it with only a few corporate guards going 'missing'. They steal it, and smuggle it away, and they finally leave that fucking city, leave all the memories and elitists and bad tastes behind.

Ellie thinks of what Nyoka said to her once, about accepting your past and the place where you're from – embracing it, even when it hurts – but Byzantium hasn't changed in the ten years she's been gone. It hasn't changed since the gates opened a hundred years ago. It wouldn't change even if Hawthorne manages to save them all from themselves.

She knows this, because the blood of privilege runs through her veins, and she'll never change herself.

If Ellie had access to a nuclear weapon, she would've used it on that place.

And whatever Ellie thought she might find by coming back here again, she didn't.

C'est la fucking vie.

000

_Ellie,_

_Come see me down in the cargo hold. These fucking cows shit everywhere again._

_Hawthorne._

Ellie almost doesn't go because she hates those stupid woolly cows and she hates how dirty and sour they smell and she hates the way their fur makes her nose itch but she goes anyways because she'd rather not get bitched at by the Captain later.

"Alex?" she says, giving a wide berth to the animals mooing their displeasure at the world. "Alex? Where are you? I'm not –"

"_Boo!"_

"_Ah!"_ she yelps, twisting around, just about to put her fist in his face.

"Now, now, Doctor, no need for that."

"Where the _fuck_ did you come from?"

Alex smirks, pointing to the ceiling beneath the walkway.

"You're getting rusty, Els," he tuts. "I was in the rafters."

Ellie lowers her fists. "Why the fuck are you hanging from the rafters like some juiced-up hobo from Edgewater?"

"Look, I know all you Halcyon natives are right sticks in the mud, but back on Earth, see, we had these things called practical jokes where –"

"I know what a practical joke is, asshole. They're supposed to be funny."

"I thought it was hilarious."

"Of course you did, you don't – _mmph."_

The Captain is kind enough to cut her off with a slow, deliberate kiss, one that steals whatever retort she had right from her mouth.

Her eyes close and she lets it happen, lets him trace her neck with his nose and his hot breath on her skin makes goosebumps rise there. His hands on her hips are steady, thumbs kneading into her flesh, and Ellie backs up until her knees hit a crate, cold through her pants. Alex gently pushes her down on the cool metal and her breath hitches when he moves his mouth from her lips to her throat, along her jaw, down her neck, and lower, until he's pulling at her undershirt to graze her breasts with his teeth.

Ellie gasps, groaning at his touch, and thrusts her hips up into his, finding him already hard against her stomach.

This is exactly where she belongs, Ellie thinks, if she were to ever belong somewhere: on this ship that she loves, the thrum of her engine reverberating through them, and a very sexy man between her legs, slowly stripping them both of their clothes.

"Alex," she starts, then gasps as his fingers enter her. "Alex, what if – _mmm_ – what if someone sees us?"

"I don't care. Do you care?"

"Not really."

"Good. Plus, no one will come down here anyways – the cows are so fucking smelly."

Ew. Right.

"Gross."

"I know, right?"

"As long as they stay over there, I'm fine with this," Ellie hums, arching her back to get closer, nearer him.

"Don't worry, they will," he says, his dick hot against her thigh. "I threatened to eat them if they so much as mention this to anyone."

"Hm. So, this ambush was premediated, was it?"

"Of course," he smirks, thrusting inside her. Ellie moans. "I always wanted to fuck you in a semi-public place."

"You're too big a pussy to fuck me in an alleyway or something?"

"Hey, alleyways are filthy places, you know."

"As filthy as a cow pen on a space ship?"

"Hm. You do have a point."

He rocks his hips against hers, slowly, not in any rush, and Ellie's skin is hot against the cold metal of the crate. She wraps her legs around him, digs her nails into his hips, nips his ear and his neck.

Ellie's no stranger when it comes to sex: it's a tool for release, a way to bribe and get what she wants. It's no more personal than Virginia against her hip, than a Stogie in her mouth – a thing she enjoys, keeps near. But never loves.

Yet this… is different. Ellie's mostly read boring old textbooks on anatomy and medicine in her time, and poetry, of course, when she gets the chance, but she's read a few other stories in between the rest, and this, with Alex here, right now – this feels like what those stories always talked about. This feels like making love.

But Ellie doesn't love him. Ellie doesn't love anyone. There's only strangers and bosses and acquaintances – alright, maybe friends – but no loves. Lovers, of course, but… not this.

So... what is Alex to her?

He's her boss, of course, the best she's ever had. And she supposes he's her friend, along with the rest of the crew. Lovers, of course.

Is that it?

_Yes,_ she tells herself, because she needs to hear it. She needs him to mean nothing to her.

But the thing is, he does.

He means a lot.

He might mean everything.

But Ellie won't admit that. She never does.

And years later, Alex dies knowing it.

000

"What're you gonna do when this is all over, Doc?"

Parvati has a grease-smudged bandana covering her face so she doesn't breathe in engine exhaust, and Ellie can't see the quiver of her lips that she's sure are under there.

"Dunno. Haven't really thought about it much, Holcomb. You?" she deflects, before the engineer can call her out on her lie.

"Well, I was hopin' I could steal some ideas offa you. Never been on a ship before, I ain't sure where to go from here."

"What about the _Groundbreaker _with Junlei?"

"Oh, I'd love to, but I'm not sure – I mean, they're all so smart there, the engineers, and I wouldn't want to distract her from her work. Plus, she hasn't asked me yet."

"Back to Edgewater then?"

"Mayhaps. Thought about it. Reed Tobson ain't there no more, and I heard that lady from the botanical labs has started growin' food there now, and the people ain't so sick no more. It would be nice to see that, you know, see the town runnin' as it should be, but…"

"But it's not here."

"Yeah. It ain't here."

"I've been on a lot of liners and cargo ships, Parvati. They're pretty much all the same. I'm sure you could find work on another one if you wanted."

"Yeah, you're probably right."

Parvati droops her head, and the girl has never been good at hiding what she's feeling. A weakness, Ellie always thought, though Parvati has the toughest will of anyone she's ever met, so maybe there's a bit of strength in it.

"But hey, who knows," Ellie adds – she can't stand the way Parvati's eyes sag anymore – "this might not be over. The Captain could keep us all aboard for a long time yet, keep us running stints for colonies. Once the _Hope_ gets up and running, a lot of people will need food and weapons and supplies. This could be a long-term thing."

Parvati frowns. "You think?"

"I know."

The engineer looks away and fiddles with something for a minute. She wipes her hands on her overalls and sighs, pulling her bandana down.

"The Captain's not… _well, _is he, Doc?"

Ellie swallows but doesn't look away.

"What makes you say that?"

"I may not be as educated or travelled as you, Ellie, but I ain't dumb either. I can see it, I think everyone sees it."

"Sees what?"

"He's _sick,"_ she breathes, voice trembling a little. "He's got his headaches and his shaky arm and you can't tell me you ain't noticed the way he… forgets things sometimes, like he just don't remember where he put his gun down, or that he forgot he already took a shower that day. Felix caught him hurling into the toilet again last night, and he didn't even eat his supper. I just – I'm scared for him, Ellie. I want this to be the last ship I ever serve on, but I just don't know."

Ellie bites her lip, plotting her words carefully.

"It's just his hibernation sickness," she says, and she's getting tired of hearing herself say that, repeating it like a broken record. "He's gotta get used to his kinematics, and he's taking drugs for his headaches, drugs that Welles gave him, I think, so he's in good hands. It's just – it's a lot, Parvati, what he's doing. He pushes himself too hard. He doesn't rest, and he needs to."

"Is that the truth, Doc?"

"Yeah. Yeah, course it is."

"You tryin' to convince me or you?"

"Look, _I'm_ the doctor here, Holcomb," she snaps, instantly regretting the way she makes Parvati frown. "It's just – sorry. I mean, I won't let anything happen to him, Parvati. Trust me."

"I do trust you, Ellie. Probably more than anyone."

Ellie wishes she trusted herself even half as much as Parvati seems to.

000

Hawthorne isn't getting any better.

He's stopped vomiting, for the most part, SAM tells her. But the robot also found eleven empty white pill bottles with the label ripped off stashed under his bed.

_Hawthorne isn't getting any better,_ she pings to Welles, because she knows the scientist knows about him. Might probably know better than anyone in the system. Is probably the one giving Hawthorne the pills in the first place.

_Who is this? How did you get this address?_

_Fenhill, Hawthorne's crew medic. Captain tends to leave his datapad lying around. For a smart man, you'd think his password would be more complicated than 'iamalexhawthorne123.'_

_The Captain has told me about you._

_Ooh, gossip. What's he say?_

_You're the doctor from Byzantium. He trusts you. You're the one he's currently sexually involved with. I hope you know he's unable to reproduce. An unfortunate side-effect of the particular concoction I injected him with._

_Yikes. Don't plan on getting knocked up though, so I'm fine with that. Does he know?_

_Yes. I am quite surprised he has not confided that information with you._

_There's a lot he doesn't say._

_Right, well, he has his reasons._

_Welles, I need to know what's wrong with him. He's not doing good. His hibernation sickness is bad. Any amount is bad, but seventy years? He shouldn't even be alive._

_You're correct. I understand your concerns. I have prescribed him Nisoprosyn Oxycorabine. He tells me it's working._

_It's not._

_I assumed as much. He says he doesn't like to bother me with these things, but it's of utmost importance that he remain healthy in order to retrieve the dimethyl sulfoxide for me._

_He's more than just a fucking tool, you know._

_Yes, you are correct. I apologise. I've come to know the Captain as a good friend and confidant these past months. Also, I must divulge – you are only the third person I've communicated with in almost forty years, and the first one not calling himself 'Alex Hawthorne'. So forgive me my lapse in communication etiquette. _

_It's fine._

_The Captain told me you had reactive kinematics installed. Excellent choice, doctor. That definitely will help his inner ear imbalance and still the lurches in the space-time relapse approximation afflicting him._

_About that – what the fuck is that about? Stopping time?_

_I'm afraid I do not have concrete answers, Dr. Fenhill. Nothing more than anything you've probably already discovered. This is more than just hibernation sickness. Like his sterility, the chemical formula in his veins has some… unintended side effects. He has extensive nerve damage in his left forearm, onset neuromuscular dementia, considerable heart palpitations and end-stage renal failure._

Oh.

A lump forms in Ellie's throat.

_Oh._

_I apologise you had to find out this way._

Her heart races, there's sweat forming at her temple –

_Does he know?_

_Yes._

Ellie can hardly swallow – the air is too dry in the room –

_Is he dying?_

No no no –

_Yes._

Yes. Yes. Yes.

_There has to be something we can do._

_Unfortunately there's very little we can do besides keep the pain at bay. I will prescribe him Hepaprozac Epidipine. I would appreciate it if you kept in contact and updated me on his condition._

_Okay._

_I expect it to deteriorate, Doctor. I suggest you expect it as well._

000

They're going to skip the Hope to Terra 2.

It's the last step in Hawthorne's grand plan, the last thing they need to do before they can start waking them up, start rebuilding and making Halcyon into something it was always meant to be.

Alive.

They're going to skip the Hope to Terra 2 tomorrow.

But not tonight.

Tonight, it's raining in Edgewater and all Ellie wants to do is go back to the _Unreliable _and sleep, sleep until this fucking nightmare is over. She feels like a stranger, a fraud, like it's only a matter of time before the universe takes notice and plucks her from the city, from these streets she doesn't belong. She's walking in a dampened dreamworld, the earth beneath her feat a ticking timebomb.

It's raining, and Hawthorne wants to go swimming.

He strips down to his boxers before the old stone fountain in the town square, the rain beating down his back, rolling down his skin in littles beads. No one is here – no one is crazy enough to be out in the rain in the dark – and he dives in. Ellie is freezing and soaked right through and certain he'll break his neck, the water's not deep enough, but he doesn't.

He surfaces, shaking the water from his wayward hair, and laughs.

"Come join me, Ellie!" he calls to her.

"Nah, I'm good. I don't want to get wet."

He laughs again, and floats there in the water on his back, floats there like he isn't dying, like this place isn't killing him. He floats there, his hair pooling out around him until it appears to her that Alex owns the fountain, owns the city itself, and it exists to hold him.

It's how she feels about any place the Captain finds himself in. The _Unreliable _was always meant to be his – there is no one else who could occupy it. Not even the real Alex Hawthorne.

No one is out, the people are gone. The world often stops when it rains – a paradox, because everything is happening all at once.

Trees drink. Fish swim. Gardens bloom. And it's here, of all places, in the dark in the rain under a watery streetlight in the city Parvati grew up in and hated, that the growth of flowers splinter her ribcage and she falls in love. The exact moment her chest blooms, making it difficult to breathe, is right now, and she knows this, knows it more surely than anything she's ever known before.

It might be pity. Alex is dying – he was right all along – and she feels sorry for him. For herself.

It might be a feeling of brotherhood, perhaps, a kinship you feel after hardships won only through being there with the other.

It might be love. She thought she loved Caster, but she never felt like this.

He's going to kill her. He's going to die and break her heart, and there's nothing she can do to stop it.

She knew. Perhaps she knew all along.

How dare he. How dare he make her love him, and do something so stupid as die.

He's pulling a Sarah on her.

Ellie wants to laugh about it, but she's not sure she can ever laugh again.

Ellie does not jump into the fountain. Later, years away, she doesn't even regret not doing so.

Those memories would've been a lot more painful if she had.

000

She traces a finger across the scars that riddle his body: the bullet spray from those spacers in Roseway, the acid burn from that giant raptidon, and there's others, too, others she's helped heal with her own hands, and others she has no story for.

She wanted to know their stories, once. Now, she's not so sure.

And touching him is a paradox in itself – his flesh is from the past, not meant to be here. An unplanned variable. He should have died an old man before Ellie was even born. But now that he's here, in a time that doesn't belong to him, he's dying.

The universe always takes what is due.

It's not fair.

000

"What's wrong, Ellie?"

"Stuff it, Felix, I'm not in the mood to talk."

"It's just – you seem awfully… _sad,_ lately. Or mad. Extra mad, I mean – more than you normally are."

"It's this fucking place."

It's not. Well, it is, but not _only._

"It's the stupid Board."

It's not.

"It's all the goddamned asinine questions people keep asking me."

It's not.

It's Hawthorne.

It always was.

000

They skip the Hope to Terra 2.

And Welles is gone.

000

"So, Phineas got himself taken to Tartarus. That's usually a one-way trip."

"I never got to know Doc Welles," Felix says. "We ain't friends or crew. But he's still one of us. He's the reason the Boss is up and walking right now. We can't just leave him to die on Tartarus."

ADA pipes in. "To extract the scientist, you will need to infiltrate the Labyrinth. But that course of action is likely to be quite dangerous, Captain."

Hawthorne sighs, splaying his fingers on the table. His crew is seated around him, around the kitchen. He looks ragged, burnt out, like a Stogie with only a puff or two left in it.

He looks like he's dying.

"We can't abandon Phineas," he says tiredly. "We have to free him if we've any hope of saving the colony."

"I am programmed to warn you whenever you exhibit inclinations toward 'risky' behaviour," ADA adds. "Breaking into Tartarus will not be easy."

"Captain? If I may?"

"Go ahead, Max."

"Getting in is the simple part. It's getting out again that's the trouble. Trust me."

"Lets just do it," Felix thrums. "Kick down some doors, grab Doc Welles, and cut a path out. We don't need a plan – we got guns!"

Nyoka picks at her teeth with a toothpick nonchalantly. "Well, folks, I ain't exactly keen on busting into a prison, but riddling Board stooges with bullets does sound like a riot and a half."

"Mr. Phineas is just about the only person with power tryin' to do any kind of good in Halcyon. We got to bust him out."

"Parvati's right," Max says. The engineer gives him a smile, and he takes it.

"I know," Alex sighs. "I know. And I know this isn't going to be easy, guys – Hell, it might not even work. We all might end up in a cell, or worse – I won't lie, there's a good chance some of us won't come out of this the other side. But we have to. I really believe we do. If saving Welles means saving Halcyon, then I'm just about ready to do whatever it takes. What – what do you all think?"

Nyoka smirks. "It's the craziest plan I've ever heard. And I mean that as a compliment."

"You're my Boss, my friend, Cap – and I'll walk into fire with you."

"I'm with Felix. I think it's insane. But maybe the colony needs a healthy dose of insanity right about now. I won't lie, just thinkin' about it all has got me into a tither – but it's the right thing to do."

"You're asking for more than bravery from us, Captain," Max says. "You're asking for everything."

"I know."

"But there are worse ways to go than dying for a good cause. I'm in."

Alex smiles.

"Let SAM get the grime out! It's what our units do best!"

"The entire plan is a terrible idea. But I admire your bravado, Captain, which leads me to illogically believe, against all odds, that you will be successful."

"Thanks, ADA. Always the voice of encouragement."

He glances toward Ellie, and something in his eyes makes her want to look away.

"What about you, Els? What's your thoughts on all this?"

Ellie fakes a smile. "Won't lie, this plan is shit. But all your plans so far have been shit – or non-existent – so what the Hell. Let's go save the world."

The Captain smirks at that.

"Thanks, guys. Look, if things go sideways in there, I just want you all to know – I'm grateful I picked all your sorry asses up when I did, else I might've had to shoot you otherwise, and that's just a waste of bullets. And – thanks. For being there. For being here now. I couldn't have done this without you."

"You're damn right," Nyoka barks. "Now let's get this rapt and mantiswarm sideshow on the road."

Alex laughs.

"Yes. Let's."

000

RAM hisses and spits fuel and sparks into the air, and the drones dither and dip, and then, like falling asleep, slowly then all at once, Sophia Akande's giant robot dies.

Hawthorne collapses.

"_Alex!"_ Ellie screeches, rushing to his side. The crew picks themselves up from the dust, helping Sanjar's forces and Junlei's people and Iconoclasts lick their wounds and pick through the dead.

"Alex! Alex, stay with me!" she yelps, slapping his bloodied, bruised face with her hands. Just when she feels like her heart might crawl out of her throat, the Captain's eyes flutter.

"Oh," he says, eyes just barely focussing on the woman above him. "Oh. We won?"

Ellie almost laughs. A smile tickles her lips and she feels that now-familiar emotion swell once more within her. She cradles the dying man in her arms, tears threatening to spill over.

"Yeah. Yeah, we won."

"Good," he breathes. "Always good to win."

Ellie doesn't want to let him go.

But she knows she has to.

She knows the ending of a story when she's there.

000

Phineas Welles is exactly as she imagined him – old and stooped and absolutely insane, muttering scientific conjectures and inane musings into the air – although she doubts she would be much different if she spent forty years alone on a spaceship with only notebooks and her hand for company.

"Ah, you must be Doctor Fenhill. It's good to finally meet you. I must say, you are much more – uh, _masculine_ than I imagined you to be, from your correspondence and all."

Ellie is far too exhausted to punch him right now.

"Yeah. You're mousier than a sprat wearing a tutu, Welles."

The man blinks, clearly out of practice with socialization.

Ellie smiles tiredly.

"Nice to meet you too."

"Ah. I see. A joke. Yes, ha-ha, very funny. I wish to thank you for looking after Alex while I was aboard my ship," he says. "I wish I could have been with him to care for him during his tribulations, but alas, up until a few moments ago I was the most wanted man in Halcyon for nearly half a century."

"It's no problem."

The scientist eyes her momentarily.

"Hm. You're wondering about his condition."

No point in lying.

"Yes."

"It's deteriorating at an accelerated pace, doctor. I suspect, if he does not die from bullet spray, he will have a heart attack or suffer nephrotoxicity from his acute kidney failure relatively soon."

Ellie winces.

"Is… is there nothing we can do? Nothing at all?"

"I'm afraid not. All I can do is keep him comfortable. He knows he's got very little time left. Does the rest of his crew know? Does he know you're aware?"

"No."

"I might make amends now."

There must be something in Ellie's eyes, something that makes Phineas' face soften.

"Take solace in knowing what you did changed the fate of everyone in Halcyon, Doctor Fenhill. Changed the course of history."

"Yeah. Doesn't feel like it."

"Good things happened, despite it all."

"No, Welles," she bites, eyes hard. "Good things don't happen. Bad things happen, and you wring victory from them while laughing at your enemies."

000

A week later, Chairman Rockwell keeps his promise and announces support for the reviving of the colonists. He absconds Welles of all misdeeds and wrongdoings, and publicly apologises to Minister Clarke.

It's a fairy tail ending if she's ever heard of one.

So why doesn't it feel like it?

The night before Rockwell's announcement, the crew of the _Unreliable _finds themselves back on _Groundbreaker,_ in The Lost Hope, in their booth in the corner, each cradling a beer, and each laughing and joking like this isn't the end of everything.

"Should we be celebrating?" she quips, interrupting Felix's wildly outlandish rehash of the time the massive raptidon almost ate the Captain for breakfast back on Monarch. "I mean, after everything that happened?"

The crew looks uncomfortable now.

"Well, this ain't exactly a celebration, Doc, but their ain't no shame in victory."

She frowns. "Not much of a victory. We lost a lot of people. Good people. People that didn't deserve to die."

"Since when have you given two shits about the morality behind it all, Ellie?" Nyoka says.

"We did exactly what we set out to do," Alex adds, eyes her with mild suspicion. "I think that counts for something."

"I think it counts for shit."

Hawthorne purses his lips.

"Everything alright, Els?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. I'm just – I'm a little tired. Think I'll hit the hay early tonight. See you all later."

Ellie gets up and leaves, leaves without turning around, without saying goodbye – and this is a goodbye.

She's leaving. And she's not coming back.

Alex manages to catch her right before she steps out onto the docks.

"Hey. Hey, Ellie – where you going?"

"I'm done, Alex," she bites, making him blink. "It's done. It's all over. We did what you came here to do, and now it's done. I'm leaving."

"You're _leaving?_ Why?"

"What did you _think _was going to happen, Alex?" she bites, both hating and loving the sting in his eyes. "That we'd get married? Settle down? Have kids? Pretend like it all meant something?"

"I – I thought it did."

Ellie's heart's breaking, she can feel it, and she does nothing to stop it.

"No, Hawthorne, it doesn't. It didn't mean a fucking thing. I used you to fuck away Caster, and that's it. That's all it was."

Alex frowns. "I don't believe you."

"I've never been so sure of anything in all my life."

"I think you're lying," he says. "I think you're terrified of being anything other than cold-hearted bitch-faced Ellie, and I think it scares you that I'm still here and I've done nothing to push you away yet, and I think you're afraid of loving me back. Because I love you, Ellie," he says, with all the desperation of a man who's losing a battle. "I love you. I want you to stay."

Ellie swallows. It feels like she's walking on a blade – it hurts, and either way she falls, it will kill her.

She could stay. She could stay with him and love him like she wants to, like he deserves to be loved.

But he's dying.

She's not as brave as he is. She cannot bear to wake up next to him every morning and be reminded of that. She can't do what he did, can't love him like he loved Sarah. She can't look into his face and watch him wither away, watch him sink and wilt and fade, until he's nothing.

Because he's everything.

Ellie has a choice, now: she's looked into the face of the wretched child in the cellar, and she can stay and be happy despite it, despite that knowledge gnawing at the back of her mind, or she can walk away from Omelas, walk away from him, and simply refuse to accept the stark reality in front of her.

Ellie steels herself, looking deep into the hollow eyes of the man in front of her.

"I don't."

And that's that.

Ellie turns away from him.

Ellie walks away from Omelas.


End file.
